The popular season is here with record heat across the country, and with a lot households having some type of air conditioner, it’s the most effective way to beat the heat. As you are relaxing in your comfortably cool home or office, thankful that your air conditioner works, let’s gain some insight at how an average central heating and cooling system works.
The Basics
Your air conditioner works the similar to your refrigerator, but understandably compared to keeping a single space cool, it has to effectively provide cooler air to your whole 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 constant circle from the outdoors to the interior of your house. It goes into the interior as a sub-cooled liquid that evaporates and collects or soaks up heat from your indoor air, expands back into vapor, then back to the outside condensing unit where it dissipates the heat and is transferred back to a sub-cooled liquid.
The Components
Your AC system is created out of four main parts: an evaporator coil, a compressor, a condensing coil, and an expansion valve or metering device.
The component where your refrigerant evaporates from a sub-cooled liquid to a super-heated vapor is called the evaporator coil, which may be indoors, in your attic, or situated in the garage. As warm indoor air is carried over the cold evaporator coil, heat is pulled from the air…and the cooled air is pushed within your house.
From the evaporator coil, the now super-heated vapor refrigerant flows to the compressor based in your outside condensing unit. The compressor increases the pressure of the vapor until it turns into a hot, high pressure vapor. The now super-hot vapor meets the condenser coil where less hot air blows by the coil, moving heat to the outdoors, and changes the refrigerant to a sub-cooled liquid. The sub-cooled liquid refrigerant is sent to the indoor evaporator coil where, through an expansion valve or metering device, the process is replicated.
Your AC system is a consistent loop of physics at work. We know the important thing to you isn’t really how it works, but that it’s working correctly. If you’d like to know the inner workings or just about keeping cool, give our technicians a call at 435-753-5515. We will team up with you and the laws of physics to keep you happy this summer.