The popular season is in full swing with record temps across the country, and with many houses having some type of air conditioner, it’s the best way to get out of the heat. As you are relaxing in your comfortably cool home or office, thankful that your air conditioner runs well, let’s gain some insight at how a typical cooling system functions.
The Basics
Your air conditioner runs the just like your refrigerator, but understandably rather than keeping a small space cool, it has to work to cool down your whole house. Both use a refrigerant that adapts swiftly 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 soaks up heat from the air in your home, expands back into vapor, then heads 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 built of four key 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 inside your home, in your attic, or located in the garage. As warm indoor air is blown throughout the cold evaporator coil, heat is pulled from the air…and the cooled air is pushed throughout your indoor space.
From the evaporator coil, the now super-heated vapor refrigerant goes back to the compressor based in your exterior condensing unit. The compressor enhances the pressure of the vapor until it turns into a hot, high pressure vapor. The now super-hot vapor enters the condenser coil where a lower amount hot air blows across the coil, removing heat to the outdoors, and returns 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 AC system is an endless loop of physics at work. We understand the important thing to you isn’t really how it works, but that it’s functioning correctly. If you’d like to know the inner workings or just about keeping cool, give our experts a call at 402-509-5940. We will team up with you and the laws of physics to ensure you cool this season.