RE: RE: looks like I made a good decisionJames m'boy,
You have missed what this technology is all about and why it's so exquisitely elegant. There is no big tech-break-through science here. It's high school physics. It captures the "wasted" energy in the infra-red part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. It's only surprising that no one thought this through years ago.
"Light" is made up of various wavelengths of radiation like radio stations on a dial. Each can stimulate different color receivers in our eyes to send a signal to our brain and we see light. These "various wavelengths" are only a small part of a much larger band of wave lengths, and most of them can't affect the receivers in our eyes so we never see them. Like FM stations on an AM radio. But as easily as we switch to FM reception, we can switch to our ability to sense temperatures. It's common to equate the brightness of a light with the amount of heat it gives off. The sun is about the brightest light source we encounter regularly and it certainly seems obvious that the strong summer light is what's responsible for summer's heat. Only it's not so simple. Compared to winter, there is much more water vapor in the air during summer months. This filters the amount of energy in the visible wavelengths that can get through to the surface. This is most easiy experienced near sunset when we can watch the hot summer sun's orange globe dip below the horizon. Compared that to a cold clear winter day when the same scene feels like the sun is searing your eyeballs. It's a lot brighter, but a lot cooler. The heat energy is in the section of the energy band we can't see. The infra-red part. It's keeping the winter temperatures from falling toward absolute zero and It's heating up summer in the other half of the world That's where the real energy is. It was always there. We just couldn't see it.