Installation and Components of Air Conditioning

There are many types of air conditioning systems that can be used in the home, including window units, portable air conditioners, ductless air conditioners and central air conditioning systems. Despite their differences, however, the physics of how they work is the same, and they all use the following components and direct expansion refrigeration. In principle, it works very much the same way as your food refrigerator. The three basic parts of an air conditioner are the evaporator, the compressor, and the condenser. The evaporator can be found on the part of the air conditioner inside the house, while the compressor and condenser are located in the outside unit.

Regardless of the type of installation, all air conditioning unitsconsist of four major components that are:

Evaporator

An evaporator is basically a heat exchanger coil that’s responsible for collecting heat from inside a room through a refrigerant gas. This component is known as the evaporator, and is where the liquid refrigerant absorbs heat and evaporates to become gas.

Compressor

As the name clearly signifies, this is where compression of the gaseous refrigerant occurs. It’s located in the outside unit, such as the part that’s installed outside the house.

Condenser

The condenser receives the vaporized refrigerant from the compressor, converts it back to liquid and expels the heat outside. Needless to say, it’s also located on the outside unit of the split Las Vegas air conditioning.

Expansion valve

Also referred to as the throttling device, the expansion valve is located between the two sets of coils which the chilled coils of the evaporator and the hot coils of the condenser. It keeps tabs on the amount of refrigerant moving towards the evaporator. Note that in the case of window air conditioning units, the three aforementioned components are all located inside a small metal box that is installed in a window opening.

Air conditioning units are found in any place that requires cooling and this includes homes, cars, hotels and even ships. To simplify things we’re going to limit the scope of this discussion to central air conditioning systems, most of which are split or central systems which those air conditioning systems commonly found in homes and offices in which some of the parts that make up the air conditioning system are found inside of the home or office building and other parts are located outside of the home or office building.

Modern life wouldn't be as comfortable as it is without air conditioning technology. It’s important to know and understand that air conditioning systems are closed pressurized systems. Flowing through the system is a coolant that facilitates heat transfer. This “fluid” is called the refrigerant. The refrigerant is a chemical compound with the physical and chemical characteristics necessary to facilitate the proper operation of the system. This means that it needs to have the correct boiling point, freezing point, etc. to allow for the system to work correctly. If the chemical doesn’t meet the exact criteria required by the system then it cannot be used.

Your Las Vegas air conditioning system needs to be maintained just like any other aspect of your home's HVAC system.