 What
is Air Conditioning?
Air Conditioning is a form of refrigeration.
It is not really “blowing cold air into your home”
as is what most people think. It is the removal of the
warm air from your home and sending outside
where it does not matter. An Air-Conditioner is
composed of three major components. The condensing unit, the indoor coil, and the
blower (furnace).
The Condensing Unit uses a compressor (the
heart of the system) to pump a (refrigerant) up to a high
pressure liquid and send it to the evaporator coil (indoors,
usually on top of your furnace or inside the cabinet of a heat
pump) through two copper pipes, where it’s pressure is reduced
allowing a drop in temperature while changing from a liquid to a
vapor.
The air from you home is drawn through your
return air ducts and is pushed across the evaporator coil where
the heat in the air is absorbed into the refrigerant. The air is
then sent back to your home through the supply air ducts at a
temperature lower than the room temperature.
This “heated up air” from your home is
then transferred via the refrigerant back to the condenser where
the fan in the condenser cools the temperature back to a point
where it once again becomes liquid and the cycle begins
again.
This is a very simple explanation; far from
complete, intended only to give a home-owner a better
understanding of what needs to be accomplished in order to create
comfort in their home.
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