The popular season has arrived with record temps across the country, and with a lot households having some type 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 runs well, let’s gain some insight at how a normal AC system works.
The Basics
Your air conditioner works the just like your refrigerator, but clearly rather than keeping a small space cool, it has to work to cool down your whole house. Both use a refrigerant that converts simply 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 absorbs 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 critical 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 indoors, in your attic, or situated in the garage. As warm indoor air is moved across the cold evaporator coil, heat is removed from the air…and the cooled air is pushed among your indoor space.
From the evaporator coil, the now super-heated vapor refrigerant returns to the compressor located in your outdoor condensing unit. The compressor increases the pressure of the vapor until it changes into a hot, high pressure vapor. The now super-hot vapor goes into the condenser coil where less hot air blows by the coil, moving heat to the outdoors, and returns 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 repeated.
Your HVAC system is a consistent loop of processes. We know the important thing to you might not be how your AC operates, but that it’s functioning successfully. If you’d like to think about the process or just about remaining cool, give our professionals a call at 614-451-0846. We will team up with you and the laws of physics to keep you happy this time around.