The popular season is in full swing with record temps across the country, and with many houses having some sort of air conditioner, it’s the best way to get out of the heat. As you are unwinding in your comfortably cool home or office, thankful that your air conditioner works, let’s gain some insight at how a typical cooling system functions.
The Basics
Your air conditioner runs the just like your refrigerator, but understandably instead of keeping a single space cool, it has to cool your entire home. Both use a refrigerant that adapts easily from liquid to gas, back to liquid again. In your air conditioner, the refrigerant is on a consistent circle from the outdoors to indoors. It goes into the interior as a sub-cooled liquid that evaporates and collects or absorbs heat from the air within your house, expands back into vapor, then back to the outside condensing unit where it dissipates the heat and is changed back to a sub-cooled liquid.
The Components
Your AC system is made of four main components: an evaporator coil, a compressor, a condensing coil, and an expansion valve or metering device.
The piece where your refrigerant evaporates from a sub-cooled liquid to a super-heated vapor is called the evaporator coil, which may be inside your home, in your attic, or located in the garage. As warm indoor air is blown across the cold evaporator coil, heat is detached from the air…and the cooled air is blown throughout your indoor space.
From the evaporator coil, the now super-heated vapor refrigerant goes back to the compressor located in your exterior condensing unit. The compressor enhances the pressure of the vapor until it shifts into a hot, high pressure vapor. The now super-hot vapor meets the condenser coil where less hot air blows past the coil, moving heat to the outdoors, and returns the refrigerant to a sub-cooled liquid. The sub-cooled liquid refrigerant is pushed to the indoor evaporator coil where, through an expansion valve or metering device, the process is redone.
Your air conditioner is an endless loop of processes. We know the important thing to you isn’t really how it works, but that it’s functioning successfully. If you’d like to know the inner workings or just about staying cool, give our professionals a call at 740-200-5591. We will work with you and the laws of physics to keep you cool this time around.