How Air Conditioners Work
Air conditioners and refrigerators work the same way. Instead of cooling just the small, insulated space inside of a refrigerator, an air conditioner cools a room, a whole house, or an entire business.
Air conditioners use chemicals that easily convert from a gas to a liquid and back again. This chemical is used to transfer heat from the air inside of a home to the outside air.
The machine has three main parts. They are a compressor, a condenser and an evaporator. The compressor and condenser are usually located on the outside air portion of the air conditioner. The evaporator is located on the inside the house, sometimes as part of a furnace. That's the part that heats your house.
The working fluid arrives at the compressor as a cool, low-pressure gas. The compressor squeezes the fluid. This packs the molecule of the fluid closer together. The closer the molecules are together, the higher its energy and its temperature.
The working fluid leaves the compressor as a hot, high pressure gas and flows into the condenser. If you looked at the air conditioner part outside a house, look for the part that has metal fins all around. The fins act just like a radiator in a car and helps the heat go away, or dissipate, more quickly.
When the working fluid leaves the condenser, its temperature is much cooler and it has changed from a gas to a liquid under high pressure. The liquid goes into the evaporator through a very tiny, narrow hole. On the other side, the liquid's pressure drops. When it does it begins to evaporate into a gas.
As the liquid changes to gas and evaporates, it extracts heat from the air around it. The heat in the air is needed to separate the molecules of the fluid from a liquid to a gas.
The evaporator also has metal fins to help in exchange the thermal energy with the surrounding air.
By the time the working fluid leaves the evaporator, it is a cool, low pressure gas. It then returns to the compressor to begin its trip all over again.
Connected to the evaporator is a fan that circulates the air inside the house to blow across the evaporator fins. Hot air is lighter than cold air, so the hot air in the room rises to the top of a room.
There is a vent there where air is sucked into the air conditioner and goes down ducts. The hot air is used to cool the gas in the evaporator. As the heat is removed from the air, the air is cooled. It is then blown into the house through other ducts usually at the floor level.
This continues over and over and over until the room reaches the temperature you want the room cooled to. The thermostat senses that the temperature has reached the right setting and turns off the air conditioner. As the room warms up, the thermostat turns the air conditioner back on until the room reaches the temperature.
Nothing sounds lovelier than a cooling device that can easily be transferred from room to room, especially if window space is not readily available, or if regular air conditioners are forbidden in the area. This device is called a portable air conditioner, and it is the solution for those who can?t stand both the heat and the fixed aspect of regular air conditioners. No air conditioner may be portable enough to literally be used anywhere, but portable AC units today come close.
A disadvantage to using portable air conditioners, however, is the possibility that they might not be able to cool an entire room. Some may even be pricey, with costs up to $500 at times, especially compared to ordinary air conditioners, but did not offer the same amount of cooling. This may be because of their smaller size. It is important to check the cooling capacity of certain models before purchasing them. Usually, a number in square feet will be listed in a unit?s information. That indicates the size of the room that the portable AC unit can cool.
Less efficient units are the ones that come with only one exhaust hose, which is used to send air from inside the room, to the condenser coils of the air conditioner, and then to the outside world. Typical portable air conditioners also come with a vent adapter bracket that that is placed outside a window to allow hot air to pass through and be released outside. Installation of those pipes is fairly easy.
The sole function of portable AC units is convenience, and unfortunately, this means that their cooling capacity is only half of that of an average window air conditioner. Whereas portable AC units usually have an energy-efficiency ratio (EER) of around 5 or 6, normal units have around 10, and can go as high as 12. However, very good quality portable AC units can match that EER, which is often why they cost more.
Some may argue that portable units are inefficient, but in truth, they require much more processes than a regular unit and therefore are often forced to multitask. Air from inside the room must be used to cool it, and a lot of air is exhausted to the outside. This causes some energy to be wasted, as it is ejected through the vent hose instead of getting to be utilized further. Also, sometimes, warm air from outside can enter the room, which adds another necessary cooling and dehumidifying process to the mix. One must commend the portable air conditioner for being able to do that much and still function properly.
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In order to be better prepared for all the aforementioned processes, some portable air conditioners come with two hoses or pipes: one that brings in air from the outside and cools it, and one that exhausts that air back to the outside. With these pipes, portable AC units are getting closer to matching the cooling process of a traditional window air conditioner, which is good news and means that in the future, portable air conditioners will be more efficient.
