Just joined the forum as I’m considering how to use my iBoost better. I’m on my third unit as the first two packed up and Marlec replaced them under warranty. The current one packed up too and I was ready to buy a different make but thought it was worth taking the top off to see if there was anything obvious wrong. There was - the mains input goes to a bridge rectifier that converts it to full-wave rectified DC, and one pin of this had an awful soldered joint which had managed to de-solder itself, probably because it had only a small amount of wetting so overheated. I re-soldered it making sure it was properly wetted, reassembled the unit and it was back in operation. I wasn’t impressed with the unit’s engineering or the company’s customer support.
I also took the time to have a look at the circuit and I could see no trace of an output DC-DC converter, just a couple of what I think are triacs (or could be SCRs since the output is DC). so I think the unit just supplies phase controlled FW rectified AC. They say in the documentation that the output is “specially modulated DC” which would check. This is presumably why the maximum cable length is limited to 3m, to avoid radiating too much interference from the cable.
The reason I’m now interested is that I would like to use the second output to feed excess power to a storage heater in the daytime, but the storage heater will be too far from the unit to directly connect it. I’m thinking of looking at the power waveform so see if I can figure out how to signal to a remote controller nearer the storage heater. Has anyone come across this kind of thing before please?