Air Conditioners Move Heat
All scenes › Chapter 1 The heat in the room
A machine that makes cold air?
An air conditioner moves heat instead of making cold
View in 3DIt moves heat; it does not make cold
It is easy to think an air conditioner makes cold air. But an air conditioner does not make “cold” at all. It grabs the heat in the room and carries it outdoors. With its heat gone, the room cools down, and that heat leaves through the outdoor unit.
Why?There is no such thing as “cold” on its own. We simply call something cold when it has little heat. So the only way to make something colder is to take heat out of it. A refrigerator does the same thing, moving heat from the food inside to the back of the fridge.
Learn moreStand in front of an outdoor unit in summer and you feel hot air blowing out. That is the heat taken from the room coming out. Because it pumps heat from a cooler place to a hotter one, a machine like this is called a heat pump.
- Heat taken out of the room (example)
- 2.5 kW
calculated from R-32 property tables (CoolProp) · example: room 27 °C, outdoors 35 °C
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More in the series
Temperatures, pressures and amounts of heat are calculated from property tables for the refrigerant R-32 (CoolProp). The example is a home air conditioner removing 2.5 kW of heat, with the room at 27 °C and the outdoors at 35 °C. In the 3D view, the refrigerant moves far slower than in real life, and the inside of the compressor and the expansion valve are shown as enlarged, simplified models.