Summer is going to be upon us in a few months and although it is still early to be thinking about basking in the warm summer sunshine, we thought we would take this opportunity to give you an expert’s opinion on how an air conditioner

works and manages to keep you cool!

How does an Air Conditioner work? Similar to a refrigerator, an air conditioner works by cooling the air and atmosphere in its surroundings but instead of only having to cool the smaller, insulated space , an air conditioner needs to cool a much larger space such as a room or a hall and even an entire office or home.

Its all gas, chemicals and air Using chemicals that can easily transform from a gas form to a liquid form and then back to a gas form, an air conditioner uses these chemicals and bouts of air to displace the heat from within the room to outside of the room.

The main operational unit of an air conditioner has 3 parts – 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 of the room, sometimes as part of a furnace. That's the part that heats your house.

The mechanism The compressor squeezes the fluid which arrives as a cool, low-pressure gas form which results in packing the molecule of the fluids more tight and the higher and more closely packed the molecules, the higher its energy and the temperature. The fluid takes the hot air with it and leaves as a high, hot-pressure gas via the compressor and then outward of the condenser, which is usually outside of the room. This is why the rear of an air conditioner can get quite hot due to the large volume of hot air it is displacing and which is why metal fin-shaped structures are built at the back of the air conditioner, allowing the hot air to 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. As the liquid pressure drops, it begins to change form, from liquid to gas and as it changes to gas, it extracts heat from the air molecules around it, resulting in cooler air left behind.

The evaporator is connected to a fan that circulates the air and pushes it outward onto the room and as the hot air is heavier, it rises above the room and the void below is filled with the batch of cooler, lighter air.

This is a continuous process until the room reaches the desired tempature – most modern air conditioners have a built in thermostat and temperature guage and you can set the exact temperature you wish to have in your room.

The Heat Pump

Want to know how to turn an ‘air conditioner’ to an ‘air warmer’?

If you flipped the mechanism of a standard air conditioner so that the hotter coil were on the inside, what you would be left with is a air warmer or a heater. Instead of burning fuel, it is moving heat resulting in a more efficient way of generating heat. A heat pump is an air conditioner that contains a valve that lets it switch between "air conditioner" and "heater." When the valve is switched one way, the heat pump acts like an air conditioner, and when it is switched the other way it reverses the flow of the liquid inside the heat pump and acts like a heater.