Converting a DateTime string in Rails with to_time to_datetime acts different. Why?

After deploying my rails app to a VPS I had some problems with 'time'. After some puzzling I found out that Rails is acting in a strange way when using the date/time conversion.

My server is set to timezone "Amsterdam" and in the Rails config I also have set timezome to "Amsterdam"

example:

I receive this string via my body content in a json/api

date = "13-03-2015 09:29"

when I convert this string like this:
date.to_datetime, the result is "Fri, 13 Mar 2015 09:29:00 +0000"

when I convert the string like this:
date.to_time, the result is "2015-03-13 09:29:00 +0100"

As you can see there is a difference in the way it is adding the time correction "+0000" vs "+0100"

So when I convert like this:
date.to_time.to_datetime, the result is "Fri, 13 Mar 2015 09:29:00 +0100"

And this is the result I needed, because my postgres database otherwise gave me back a wrong date (+1 hour)

My questions are:

1. What is the explanation for the difference in behaviour of .to_date and and .to_datetime

2. How does Postgres handle dates. When saving a datetime parameter like this "Fri, 13 Mar 2015 09:29:00 +0000" and I render this date in a json response it is 1 hour later.

Hope someone can explain this to me.
Martijn

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