Hello! Would appreciate any basic explanation on how airconditioners work. Mine just got busted (and I’m from a very hot, tropical country!). I’m tempted to just call the maintenance guy, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to first learn about it before spending some dough. I’ll be using A/C units all my life anyway.
Been watching some YT videos but once terms like “latent heat vaporization” are mentioned, my mind just shuts off. Many thanks to all the articulate and patient folks out there!
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The main idea of all ACs is the same.
If you have a gas and you pressurize it, it gets hot. You can try it: if you pump a bike, the pump gets hot at around the valve. (When I was child, we had metal valves that literally burnt our fingers.)
If you release a pressurized gas, the opposite happens: it gets cold. You can try it if you have a CO2 cartridge (like this home made soda machine). When you pop it open, it gets frozen cold.
An AC unit has two sides, a cold and a hot side.
The hot side is outside of the apartment and it has a pressurized gas tank and a pump that keeps the gas under pressure. This gas is the working thing that is the heart of the whole unit.
The cold side is in the apartment, and it’s basically a lot of tubes. When some cooling is needed, a valve releases some gas from the hot side into the cool side. The gas expands into the tubes and cools them down.
Then a simple fan blows air through the cold tubes and you have your cooled air.
Then the same gas is pressurized again and circulates in the closed system.
Of course a real AC unit has a lot more things: electronics, filters and so on. Any of these can go wrong/clogged.
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