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.
How the pieces fit together
An interesting side note
The refrigerant is a gas when it exits the evaporator coil, but it's a liquid when it exits the condenser coil. The refrigerant has an especially low boiling point. Even though the refrigerant is cooler than room temperature, it boils in the tubes inside your house and turns into vapor — much like water boils and turns into steam. This is an especially efficient way of transferring heat.
Tips
David Pannier, president of Trane Residential Systems, recommends:
• Have a professional check your AC once a year to make sure the condenser coil and evaporator coil are clean, so that they work properly.
• Change filters regularly. If the filter gets dirty, the fan has to work harder to blow air over the evaporator coil and cool your house. So you'll burn more energy to accomplish the same thing.
Sources: David Pannier, president of Trane Residential systems; and Dr. Frank Pyrtle III, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of South Florida.
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