The popular season is in full swing with record highs across the country, and with a lot households having some type of air conditioner, it’s the best way to beat the heat. As you are unwinding in your comfortably cool home or office, appreciating that your air conditioner runs well, let’s gain some insight at how a normal AC system works.
The Basics
Your air conditioner operates the similar to your refrigerator, but obviously instead of keeping a small space cool, it has to effectively provide cooler air to your whole home. Both use a refrigerant that adapts simply from liquid to gas, back to liquid again. In your air conditioner, the refrigerant is on a constant ring from the exterior to the interior of your house. It goes into the home as a sub-cooled liquid that evaporates and gathers or takes in heat from the air in your home, 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 made of four key pieces: 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 indoors, in your attic, or located in the garage. As warm indoor air is moved throughout the cold evaporator coil, heat is detached from the air…and the cooled air is blown within your indoor space.
From the evaporator coil, the now super-heated vapor refrigerant returns to the compressor located in your exterior condensing unit. The compressor increases the pressure of the vapor until it turns into a hot, high pressure vapor. The now super-hot vapor goes into the condenser coil where a lower amount 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 pushed to the indoor evaporator coil where, through an expansion valve or metering device, the process is redone.
Your air conditioner is a consistent loop of processes. We realize the important thing to you likely isn’t what happens behind the scenes, but that it’s operating the right way. If you’d like to talk science or just about remaining cool, give our experts a call at 641-316-9803. We will team up with you and the laws of physics to ensure you comfortable this season.