Summer is here with record temps across the country, and with many houses having some type of air conditioner, it’s the best way to escape the sun. As you are unwinding in your comfortably cool home or office, grateful that your air conditioner works, let’s gain some insight at how an average cooling system functions.
The Basics
Your air conditioner runs the similar to your refrigerator, but obviously rather than keeping a single space cool, it has to work to cool down your whole house. Both use a refrigerant that converts easily from liquid to gas, back to liquid again. In your air conditioner, the refrigerant is on a regular ring from the outside to the interior of your house. It goes into the home as a sub-cooled liquid that evaporates and assembles or absorbs heat from the air within your house, expands back into vapor, then heads 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 created out of four critical components: an evaporator coil, a compressor, a condensing coil, and an expansion valve or metering device.
The part where your refrigerant evaporates from a sub-cooled liquid to a super-heated vapor is called the evaporator coil, which may be inside, in your attic, or located in the garage. As warm indoor air is carried across the cold evaporator coil, heat is pulled from the air…and the colder air is pushed within your home.
From the evaporator coil, the now super-heated vapor refrigerant returns to the compressor located in your outdoor condensing unit. The compressor raises the pressure of the vapor until it changes into a hot, high pressure vapor. The now super-hot vapor meets the condenser coil where a smaller amount hot air blows past the coil, eliminating the heat to the outdoors, and changes 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 replicated.
Your AC system is an endless loop of movement. We realize the important thing to you isn’t really how it works, but that it’s operating the right way. If you’d like to know the inner workings or just about staying cool, give our professionals a call at 623-208-6444. We will team up with you and the laws of physics to keep you comfortable this season.