Air conditioners are a staple of 21st century life, but the specifics on how they work are often known only to professionals. Services that offer air conditioning repair in Teaneck can usually explain the details if something goes wrong with your system, but home owners can also educate themselves about certain particulars. For example, why are parts of the air conditioner on the outside of the house? The short answer is to vent hot air. But how does a unit designed to produce cool air end up producing hot air?
The components on the outside of the house usually include the condenser valves, the compression coils and the condenser motor. This is where the process of air conditioning begins. Refrigerant gas enters the valve, which places it under a great deal of heat and pressure, and then moves to the coils, where the heat is bled off into the surrounding air. The liquid – still under pressure – then moves inside, where it passes through an expansion valve and into the evaporator coils. As it evaporates, it pulls heat from the surrounding air, which can then be blown into your house to cool it.
That process only works if the refrigerant is in liquid form and it won’t reach liquid form without giving off a great deal of heat. Obviously, you don’t want any of that hot air in your air conditioner, since it will defeat the whole purpose of air conditioning. Hence, that part of the cycle is often left outside. The hot air can be vented into the outside atmosphere and the condenser array can do its job without interfering with the second part of the cycle (the one that produces the cool air). It’s a strange set-up but it makes a lot of sense in terms of efficiency. And with air conditioners, efficiency is the name of the game.
If you know why parts of the air conditioner are on the outside of the house, you also know that the delicacy of the system requires professional attention when something goes wrong.
For air conditioning repair in Teaneck, give the technicians at DB Heating & Cooling a call. We can fix just about anything, so contact us today!