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Re: conservation of energy



> All this means to us is, all of the electricity consumed by our lights ends
> up as heat, somewhere in the room. High efficiency lights put more energy
> into the visible light spectrum. BUT, if there are no windows in the room,
> what happens to that visible light? Where does it go? Oversimplified, it
> bounces about the room changing wavelengths, part of it being absorbed at any
> particular wavelength, and all eventually appears as HEAT. If your fish room
> is too cold, that is great. If your fish room is consistently too warm, that
> is not so great. So, what do we do? 

What we are really trying to do is deliver light (energy) to the plants 
to drive chemical reactions.  That energy, I would expect, doesn't reappear
as heat until the plant tissue decays or gets burned or something.  The
goal of the aquarium lighting folks is to get the most energy delivered
to these chemical reactions per unit energy taken from the wall outlet.  
Having an optimized spectrum helps a lot.  

Of course, plants waste a lot of energy, and lights waste a lot of 
energy....

> Jean Olson
> JOlson8590 at AOL_com
> Out in the Boonies, near
> Cambridge, Iowa

John Pitney       in cold, sunny Champaign, Illinois 
pitney at uiuc_edu