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Old 03-10-2012, 12:05 AM   #7
serialk11r
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I guess you can think of it as being analogous to a heat pump. If you have an air conditioner in your house, running it in heating mode (assuming it doesn't use a hot water radiator type thing) will give you 4-5 times as much heat as the electricity you put in.

With this, it's like a Peltier cooler, except somehow the light producing process is directly absorbing the heat (!)...usually if you're going to turn heat into visible light, you have to have it at a very high temperature. On top of that, thermoelectric devices have horrible efficiency, and LEDs aren't actually that great either (yet), so this black magic device that converts between the 2 can suddenly get apparently very high efficiency? WTF?
Darn, I better go take some quantum mechanics class sometime.
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