Now let us have a look at the working of an air conditioner. The main function of an air conditioner is to remove the heat from the house to the outside so that the interior space of the house is made cool and comfortable. It is done by blowing cold air into the room by drawing out hot air outside. The air is cooled by blowing it over a number of cold pipes known as the evaporator coil. In fact, to put it simply, the cooling happens in the same process as the cooling happens when water evaporates from human skin. The evaporator coil has a refrigerant known as Freon which changes from a liquid to a gas as it absorbs heat from the air. The refrigerant is then pumped outside the house into another coil where it loses the heat and again gets converted to liquid. The outside coil is called the condenser as the hot gaseous element gets condensed into a liquid there. The compressor of the air conditioning unit is used to pass the refrigerant from one coil to the other and it also changes the pressure of the refrigerant so that it changes to liquid or to gas at the appropriate coils.
The energy that is required to perform all these activities is supplied by the motor that in turn runs the compressor. Here it must be noted that an air conditioning unit gives a lot higher cooling energy than the energy used by the compressor. This becomes possible because the changing of the refrigerant from a liquid to a gas and back again allows the whole system to move lot more energy than the amount of energy used by the compressor.