An air conditioner is a device that moves heat from one place to another. It picks up heat from inside
your home and moves it to the outside. In other words, it pumps heat from one place to another.
Although we could call it a heat pump, we usually reserve that term for air conditioners that can pump
heat in either direction - inside to outside or outside to inside.
When you put your face in front of that AC vent, it may seem that an air conditioner creates cold, but
in reality, it's removing thermal energy from inside your house and sending it outside. This transfer of
heat from your home's air does indeed make the air cooler, and the air blowing out of the supply vents
does feel cold. It's best to think of the process, though, as a heat flow from inside to outside.
Heat doesn't flow from cold to hot, so if we want to get the heat out of that refrigerant and put it into
95 F air, we've got to increase the temperature. The compressor does that job and takes it up to a
temperature well above ambient (outdoor) temperatures. Air conditioners work even in places like
Phoenix, Arizona, where the outdoor temperature can get to 115 F and above, so the compressor has a
lot of work to do.
Step 3: The refrigerant gives up its heat to the outdoor air.
After getting pumped up to a high temperature, the now hot, vaporized refrigerant passes through
another coil. This is the coil that surrounds the compressor in the outdoor unit. A fan inside the unit
pulls outdoor air through the coil and sends it out the top of the outdoor unit. The hot outdoor air
passing over the even hotter coil causes heat to flow out of the refrigerant and into the outdoor air.
Heat flows from warmer to cooler!
As heat flows out of the refrigerant and into the outdoor air, it cools off below the condensation point,
and the vapor condenses back into a liquid. The temperature of the refrigerant after coming out of step
3 is still pretty high, which you can verify by putting your hand on the uninsulated copper pipe coming
out of the outdoor unit.
Step 4: The refrigerant gets cold.
As the refrigerant travels from outside to the indoor unit, it goes through a special device before it
enters the coil I talked about in step 1. This special device lets the warm, liquid refrigerant expand into
a bigger volume, which causes the temperature to drop - a lot!
Have you ever used one of those CO2 cartridges to pump up your bicycle tire? Have you ever used a
can of compressed air to clean out the keyboard on your computer? If so, you've probably noticed that
after you release the gas from the cartridge or can, the container gets very cold. That's exactly what
happens in this part of an air conditioner.
Why do we want to lower the temperature?
Heat flows from warmer to cooler!
We need to get the refrigerant colder than the indoor air so that we can pull the heat out of it, so this
step is critical. In fact, I like to say that this is where the magic happens in an air conditioner.