Summer is in full swing with record heat across the country, and with a lot households having some sort of air conditioner, it’s the best way to beat the heat. As you are unwinding in your comfortably cool home or office, grateful that your air conditioner functions, let’s look at how a typical central heating and cooling system works.
The Basics
Your air conditioner operates the same way as 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 converts simply from liquid to gas, back to liquid again. In your air conditioner, the refrigerant is on a regular ring from the outside to indoors. It goes into the interior as a sub-cooled liquid that evaporates and assembles 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 made of four key pieces: 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 inside, in your attic, or situated in the garage. As warm indoor air is blown throughout the cold evaporator coil, heat is removed from the air…and the colder air is driven throughout your house.
From the evaporator coil, the now super-heated vapor refrigerant goes back to the compressor stationed in your exterior 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 by the coil, removing heat to the outdoors, and switches the refrigerant to a sub-cooled liquid. The sub-cooled liquid refrigerant is returned to the indoor evaporator coil where, through an expansion valve or metering device, the process is redone.
Your HVAC system is an endless loop of movement. We know the important thing to you might not be how your AC operates, but that it’s working successfully. If you’d like to know the inner workings or just about staying cool, give our experts a call at 484-646-3363. We will partner with you and the laws of physics to confirm you happy this time around.