> Hmm.  Makes you wonder what some of the harmless large organic molecules
> get split into.

In theory the split bits of whatever you were thinking of recombine
immediately with locally available ions of suitable charge. For biological
purposes they should be k.o. this way. That's water most of the time (H+
and OH-). Hard UV photons carry enough energy to split C=C bonds afaik, so
all organic molecules will be eventually destroyed completely (broken down
to alkanes and alkyl compounds probably). I don't know if they carry
enough energy to break C-C too so they'd turn everything into methane and
methyl compounds eventually. But I am not a chemist... Anyway this takes
time (hours, days, years etc).

The ready made water steriliser equipment runs the lamp for several hours
a day if I am not wrong. Adding some reactive additives to the water
before irradiation improves cleaning. One possible additive is ozone
(perhaps bubble the water with air - the UV turns some of the oxygen in
the bubbles into ozone).

Peter

PS: I seem to remember that hard UV also splits water (into H2 and O2) but
I may be wrong. Maybe one of the analytical chemistry gurus could step in
here - and perhaps drop a hint as to where one finds a bond energy table
on the web - I have a program called cactus (demo I think) that does
something like this but as I said I am not a chemist. cactus is from Uni
Erlangen in Germany, I got it in a Suse linux disk.

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