How do air conditioning units make cold air?

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It’s so hot and I’m grateful to have them but how do they actually create the cold without ice or anything?

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5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The biggest takeaway for you is that cold isn’t something that’s “created.”

Cold is how much something is “not hot.” You can create heat, but cold is the lack of that heat. If you take away heat (energy) things get colder.

So AC takes heat from the cold side and moves it somewhere else. That’s why AC units have vents outside, to vent out the heat to atmosphere.

Now how that works is there are two “coils” which just like they sound are two tubes. If you fold them out, it’s just a big circle with two parts that break it up, on opposite sides of each other. Between them, there’s a valve on on one side and a compressor on the other. The compressor compresses a gas into a liquid, the valve lets liquid out so it can become a gas.

Gas has more energy than liquid, so when you go from gas to liquid, you need to give off energy, or heat. When you go from liquid to gas, you need to take in energy, so you take it from the air.

That air with less energy is colder, so then your AC unit blows that into your house.

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