Have you ever wondered how an airconditioner actually works? Here is an
overview of the ins and outs of central AC.
A central airconditioner is a large appliance that is permanently
installed inside or outside of your home. The purpose of the central AC is to
cool your entire home. As a result, this appliance packs quite a bit of power
in order to force cold air throughout your entire house.
With the central AC, there is a unit inside your house that pulls the
hot air out of each room. A separate device pushes cool air back into your home.
At the same time, the AC unit also works to reduce humidity.
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Basically, there are 3 steps in how a central AC is able to cool your home.
First, it sucks the hot air out of each room. This requires the use of
evaporator coils in the AC unit. Inside each room, the evaporator coils – along
with the refrigerant – pull the heat into the unit.
There is a fluid - called refrigerant -
used inside the air conditioner that has a very low boiling point. Because it
has such a low boiling point, it is able to easily go from a liquid to a solid.
In recent years, manufacturers have found more environmentally-friendly
refrigerants to use. Earlier in the twentieth century, they often used Freon as
a refrigerant but they learned that it depleted the ozone layer.
The second part of the process requires that the condenser unit remove any
moisture from the hot air that it has collected. This is also known as the dehumidification
process.
Inside the AC unit, the refrigerant moves from the compressor to the
condenser. It is the condenser, which will eventually push the hot air outside.
This is why essential AC so important to have in hot and humid climates. The airconditioner
does a terrific job in not only cooling the room but also reducing the humidity
The third and final step in the air-conditioning process involves the
compressor, which forces cool air back into your home. The cool air is pushed
through the ducts into the room.
Essentially, central AC functions like the 3 phases of water that we
learned about in high school chemistry class: solid, liquid, and gas. When a
substance moves from one form to another (like ice melting into water or water
boiling in evaporating), this is referred to as a “phase change.” When a phase
change occurs, one of two things can happen: either heat is removed from the
environment or heat is released into the environment.
In a central airconditioner, the refrigerant cycle turns liquid into a gas.
This is also known as evaporation. It is this evaporation process that allows
the AC unit to pull the heat out of your house.
After the refrigerant is forced into the compressor and the condenser,
it returns to liquid form as water. This phase change does the opposite of the previous
one, by returning heat. The main difference, however, is that the AC unit
forces the heat to the outside of your home.
So
essentially, an air conditioner works by removing heat from the inside of your
house and transferring it to the outside of your house.
