Central air conditioners operate by moving any and all of the heat within your living space, outside. Once it does this, it also ends up blowing cool air back into the building.
How Does It Work?
The system cools the air by blowing it over a bunch of cool pipes, also known as an evaporator coil. If you’re looking for a comparison, it works similar to that of a fridge, or when water evaporates off of your skin (when you sweat).
This evaporator coil is full of a coolant that transforms from liquid to gas when it absorbs heat out of the air. This new air is then moved to another coil, then eventually to the outside of the building where it cools down and goes back to its original form.
There is also a pump called the compressor. This pump moves the coolant between two coils, and also changes the pressure of the coolant to make sure that it condenses and evaporates into the proper coil.
The compressor runs on a motor, and this motor uses all of the energy needed to complete the action, whilst giving out around three times the cooling energy that the compressor uses. This is because the state of the coolant changes, allowing a lot more energy to be moved than the compressor normally uses.
