Air conditioners are a great way to keep your home cool and comfortable during the hot summer months. But how do they work? Air conditioners remove heat and moisture from the air inside the house, then distribute heat and moisture to the outside while returning freshly cooled air back to the house.
Air conditioners
never take air from outside and place it in your home. Instead, they work by cooling the air that is already in your home.The actual use of process air conditioners to reduce the ambient air temperature in a room is based on a very simple scientific principle. The rest is achieved with the application of a few intelligent mechanical techniques. In reality, an air conditioner is very similar to another appliance in the house - the refrigerator. Air conditioners do not have the outer shell that a refrigerator depends on to insulate its cold box.
Instead, the walls of your home keep cold air in and warm air out. The heat inside your home is absorbed and transferred to the outside through a cooling agent or “cooling”. The coolant is contained within coils that travel through a closed system. The coils guide the coolant from inside the house to the outside and back to the inside.
An air conditioner can cool a building because it removes heat from the indoor air and transfers it to the outside. A chemical coolant in the system absorbs unwanted heat and pumps it through a piping system to the outdoor coil. The fan, located in the outdoor unit, blows outdoor air over the hot coil, transferring heat from the coolant to the outside air. This air is used to cool the gas in the evaporator and, as heat is removed from the air, it cools.
The first modern air conditioning system was developed in 1902 by a young electrical engineer named Willis Haviland Carrier. Split-system air conditioners offer a variety of options, including basic single-stage systems, quieter and more efficient two-stage systems, and quieter, energy-saving multi-stage systems. The refrigerant, now a superheated vapor, reaches the condenser (which is located outside) and is exposed to outside air. Now that you have a basic understanding of how air conditioners work, let's dig a little deeper and describe the operation of the whole process.
There are three main types: split system air conditioner, packaged air conditioner and ductless air conditioner. As the refrigerant passes through the condenser coil and the cooler outside air passes through the coil, the air absorbs heat from the refrigerant, causing the refrigerant to condense from a gaseous state to a liquid state. So before answering the question of how air conditioners work, it will be useful to know what constitutes a typical system. The indoor unit, usually an oven or fan coil, includes the evaporator coil and the blower fan (air handler) that circulates air throughout the house.
There is a fan that is connected to the evaporator and circulates air inside the property and through the evaporator fins. When an air conditioner functions as a refrigerator, expanding and compressing a refrigerant chemical to transfer heat from the inside of a building to the outside, an air cooler sucks in warm air, passes it through or near water to cool it down, and then expels it back into your room. The refrigerant gas leaves your house through a copper pipe and passes to the compressor of an outdoor unit. Unlike air conditioners which work best when doors and windows are kept closed, air coolers should be placed with good airflow near an open window (where fresh dry air enters) and with an open door (for humid exhaust air to escape).
A fan blows indoor air through cold coils of an evaporator where heat inside your home is absorbed into refrigerant. When thermostat detects that indoor temperature is at desired level it turns off your AC unit. So now you know how an AC works!.
