Air conditioning can feel like magic on a hot day, and to the uninitiated the cooling process might sound like magic, too.
That’s because you are not adding cold to the air, you are removing heat.
“How an air conditioner works is听extracting the heat inside the house and taking it outside,” said Carlo De Jesus, an HVAC lab manager and instructor at Northern Virginia Community College in Woodbridge.
The system is a loop, De Jesus told 小萝莉影视. A liquid refrigerant flows into the house, where a fan blows warm air and causes the refrigerant to evaporate. The refrigerant, now a vapor, takes the heat outside to the condenser coil to be released.
鈥淎nd the outdoor unit, the condenser will change that refrigerant from a vapor back to a liquid,鈥� De Jesus said.
“So the way we get cold air is not because it’s the evaporator being cold. The evaporator is removing the heat from that air, and then it becomes cold air,” he said.
With AC filters, it pays to be cheap
De Jesus said diagnostic tools are required for troubleshooting and fixing air conditioning issues, but there is one thing homeowners can do to help their systems run more efficiently: buy the cheap air intake filters.
鈥淭he best filters to use are really the cheapest ones,鈥� De Jesus said.
Expensive filters might advertise cleaner air, but 鈥渢hen you’re restricting air flow, so it can’t pull in air as needed,” he said. “That is the misconception of a lot of people trying to purchase the most expensive or best filter there is.鈥�
Settling a household debate
Does setting the thermostat very low make the home cool faster?
鈥淚t will not,鈥� De Jesus said. Cooling speed is based on how much air the system is bringing into the house, and that is fixed.
“Your unit is not going to run faster, because let’s say it’s 77 degrees, and, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you know, I want it to cool off faster, let me drop it to 66 degrees,'” he said.听
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