Air Heaters are easy to understand, it’s basically just running electricity through a wire, so that excess energy turns into heat. Heating is easy enough that you can do it in the form of a campfire with primitive tools.
Air Cooling is a lot harder. I can’t think of a single way to just up and cool air without the use of something that’s already cold.
So how does Air Conditioning work?
(If it’s just some specific obscure chemical reaction then I’ll be disappointed)
In: Technology
First thing you should understand is that heat is just a measure of how much something is vibrating in the molecular scale. Hotter something is, the more the particles vibrate. Colder, the less vibration.
The a.c. first compresses a special gas on the outside half of the a.c. unit. Gasses vibrate constantly and when they are compressed together, they’re now squished together and vibrate against each other. Kind of like you rubbing your hands together. This generates a lot of heat as you can imagine. This heat is pumped to the outside air. Either by being outside in the first place or by a pipe.
As it generates heat, the particles are slowing each other down. Think of it like friction.
Once the gas has slowed down enough under pressure, it turns into a liquid. This liquid is pumped to the indoor side of the a.c. and is then relieved of the pressure. This liquid normally wants to be a gas and so it quickly evaporates. However remember that the particles gave up a lot of its speed rubbing against each other, so in order to gain enough energy to go back into a gas, it grabs energy from its surroundings. This being the air inside your house, cooling your house down.
When this gas has equalized in temperature to your house again, it is pumped back to the outside half of the a.c. unit and the cycle restarts.
Its not 100% accurate but its the easiest way to understand.
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