I understand all the cooling liquid and whatnot but what makes the fridge hear up from the outside? Also for freezers.
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Because fridges are heat pumps. They’re taking the heat out of their insides and pumping it out. That’s really the long and short of it.
Because what we interpret as “cold” is just the absence of heat. If you want to make the inside of a fridge cold, you need to move the heat in a fridge out of the fridge.
You know that refrigerators work by pumping a fluid back and forth from the inside to the outside. What you might not know is that pumping doesn’t juts move the fluid, it’s changes it’s temperature. As the fluid is pumped *into* the fridge the pumping cools it down. Inside the fridge the fluid wants to warm up so it sucks up heat from the food and stuff and then it gets pumped back outside. This time the pumping *heats* the fluid up a lot. So now the opposite happens, outside the fridge the fluid is really, really hot and it gives that heat off to the room, that’s the heat you’re feeling outside the fridge. Eventually the fluid returns to room temperature and then gets pumped back inside the fridge (and becomes cold as it does so, etc.)
Heat is energy, and temperature is the effect that that energy has on stuff.
As long as the inside of the fridge is above absolute zero you can keep extracting heat (normal engineering practicalities considered), which will make the outside hotter.
TL;DR you can heat your kitchen from your freezer.
“Cold” as a concept doesn’t really exist, it’s just the **absence** of heat. As such we can’t create cold, to make something cold we have to remove heat from it.
There’s several ways we can do that
(Skip this paragraph ig you don’t care about that)
for example we could create a chemical reaction that takes heat energy and converts it into chemical energy, this making stuff colder (there’s an amonia reaction that quickly cools down to around -20°C). Another way would be to take something that’s really cold already (for whatever reason) and have that absorb heat, increasing it’s own heat energy, but decreasing that of the space it’s in (that’s how ice cubes and cold packs work). Another possibility is to have a liquid evaporate, gas is a more energetic state than liquid, so as the liquid evaporates it takes some of the surrounding heat with it (this is why alcohol feels very cool when you spill it on your skin)
(Back to rleevance again)
However, the most efficient, and importantly, cyclical solution (meaning it doesn’t rely on a fuel that would have to be filled up again and again), that we found is called a “heat pump”, which is a device that can take heat energy from one place (inside your fridge/freezer) and transport it to somewhere else (the radiator on the back of your bridge), and sincs all the heat energy from inside is being moved to the outside, that results in the outside getting warm.
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