How air conditioners take hot and humid air, and make it drier and cold.
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You know if you hold spary can (like canned air) upside down, the spray is super cold? If you sprayed that inside a tube and blew air over it, it would get so cold frost would form on it and the air would get colder.
Your ac does this. It turns a gas into a liquid , and that gas gets sprayed through a coil that air blows over. The coil shouldn’t freeze but should get so cold that water forms on it like in the outside of a cold glass of water. Water drips away and down a drain, making the air dryer. The air blowing over the coil gets cooler. So you end up with cool and dry air.
Outside your house the ac is basically making the gas back into a liquid again. The box outside is doing 2 big things. It is has a compressor to turn the gas back into liquid, and a fan and coil to remove the heat that compressing the gas to liquid creates. (it’s not a liquid until after the compressor, and after being cooled, but that may be beyond eli5).
Its a closed loop that happens over and over. Compressor makes the liquid by compressing then cooling the gas. Liquid gets sprayed through a small hole turning into gas in a coil inside, gets cold and cools and drys the air, then it goes back outside to get compressed and cooled into a gas all over again.
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