At Total Comfort, Inc., we believe that understanding the basics of your residential cooling system can help you appreciate what it takes to keep it running efficiently. Your air conditioner doesn’t “create” cold air. Instead, it’s a heat-moving machine. It pulls heat from inside your house and dumps it outside. This entire process relies on a special liquid-to-gas-to-liquid cycle using refrigerant. Here is the three-step process. Give us a call today.
The Evaporator (Inside)
First, warm air from your home is pulled into the system by a fan and blown across the evaporator coil. This coil, located in your indoor unit, is filled with cold, low-pressure liquid refrigerant. This refrigerant acts like a sponge, absorbing the heat from your air. The act of absorbing heat causes the refrigerant to “boil” and turn into a low-pressure gas, while the newly cooled air is blown back into your house.
The Compressor (Outside)
The refrigerant, now a lukewarm gas, travels to your outdoor unit. There, it enters the compressor—the heart of your AC system. The compressor squeezes this gas, increasing its pressure. Just like a bicycle pump gets hot when you use it, this high-pressure compression makes the refrigerant gas extremely hot—much hotter than the air outside.
The Condenser (Outside)
This hot, high-pressure gas then moves to the condenser coil (the metal fins on your outdoor unit). A large fan blows ambient outdoor air across these coils. Since the refrigerant is hotter than the outside air, the heat transfers out of the refrigerant and is released into the atmosphere. As the refrigerant loses its heat, it condenses back into a high-pressure liquid, ready to return inside, pass through an expansion valve (which lowers its pressure and temperature), and start the entire cycle over again.
CALL TODAY
A proper residential air conditioning installation is crucial to ensuring this scientific loop works perfectly. As your local air conditioning company in Corona, Total Comfort, Inc. has the expertise to ensure your system is installed and maintained for maximum efficiency. If your AC isn’t moving heat the way it should, give us a call!