The summer season is here with record heat across the country, and with many houses having some type of air conditioner, it’s the best way to beat the heat. As you are relaxing in your comfortably cool home or office, grateful that your air conditioner runs well, let’s gain some insight at how a typical central heating and cooling system works.
The Basics
Your air conditioner operates the similar to your refrigerator, but understandably compared to 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 regular 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 soaks up heat from your indoor air, expands back into vapor, then returns to the outside condensing unit where it dissipates the heat and is changed back to a sub-cooled liquid.
The Components
Your AC system is created out 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 indoors, in your attic, or situated in the garage. As warm indoor air is carried throughout the cold evaporator coil, heat is pulled from the air…and the colder air is blown throughout your home.
From the evaporator coil, the now super-heated vapor refrigerant flows to the compressor stationed 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 smaller amount 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 returned to the indoor evaporator coil where, through an expansion valve or metering device, the process is repeated.
Your HVAC system is a constant loop of processes. We know the important thing to you isn’t really how it works, but that it’s working successfully. If you’d like to think about the process or just about staying cool, give our professionals a call at 952-373-0377. We will team up with you and the laws of physics to keep you comfortable this season.