It seems like they’d keep from being frozen because of creating heat for a house.
In: Technology
Are you talking about a heat pump, or when your AC unit outside ices over in the summer?
The unit outside it called a condensing unit. It takes the low-pressure gas and compresses it into a liquid. Basic physics tells us when doing that you generate heat. So to dissipate some of that heat that is why there are the coils and fan. The liquid passes through them and the fan circulates the outside air to help cool off the hot liquid.
The liquid travels inside to your evaporator coil, there it expands back from a high pressure liquid to a low-pressure gas. This creates a temperature drop. Think like when you take the can of compressed air and turn it upside down and it squirts out cold.
If you have a heat pump, essentially this process gets reversed. Literally the compressor goes into reverse. While it can be very cold outside, as long as there is *some* difference in temperature between the ambient air and temperature of the freon gas, the system works. If your unit outside ices over, the system will reverse itself again operating like a normal AC to generate heat and defrost the outside unit. Likewise most heat pump systems have an emergency heat option which is basically just electric heat strips (not very efficient).
When your AC unit ices up during the summer, it is because your system has a leak. Without going into details, when expands into a gas and ‘cools’, it now ends up too cold and ices over the coil. Without air circulation over the coil, now that freon can’t warm up so instead it’s traveling back outside to the unit and ices it over too eventually.
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