How does an air conditioner work?

Air conditioning is about the only thing that can take the heat out of a Florida summer. But how does it work? The easy answer: It takes the hot air inside of your house and shoots it outside.

1. Inside your house, if you have air conditioning, you have a winding tube called an evaporator coil. In this tube is a gas called a refrigerant. The refrigerant is roughly 45 degrees — a lot cooler than room temperature. A fan blows air over the tube, which cools your house.

After the refrigerant passes through the evaporator coil, it flows through a tube to your outdoor AC unit.

2. There it flows into a device called the compressor that— you guessed it — compresses the refrigerant. As the pressure of the refrigerant goes up, so does its temperature — according to a basic law of science, the temperature of a gas increases with pressure. By the time this pressurized refrigerant comes out, it has heated up to about 180 degrees — twice the temperature of a June day in Florida.

3. The refrigerant flows next to another winding tube called a condenser coil, and an outdoor fan blows air over the coil. Even hot summer air is cooler than the refrigerant at this point. So the fan cools the refrigerant, which gives up some of its heat to the outside air. The refrigerant, which absorbed heat as it was flowing through your house, now releases heat outdoors.