Air conditioning systems keep us comfortable during hot weather. Everyone knows this, but beyond that level of knowledge most people enter a realm of little understood, half-magical mystery. This is true not only for customers but some mechanics as well.
Fortunately our mechanics have all been trained in theory. That makes it easy for our techs to diagnose problems right the first time. The know the "how and why" each part does it's job and what happens when they don't do their job. Most mechanics just know if they change this or that part, it fixes the problem most times (but not always). They just shoot for the highest odds by replacing what they guess is the problem might be.
Let's take at look at cooling theory and de-mystify some of it. You can skip some of the theory and jump to the section on why it does not cool by clicking here.
First we will start to eliminate some common misconceptions. Freon is not a chemical that cools things down. Freon is a medium of transfer for heat just like a bus can be a medium of transport for people.
In fact, even the word Freon is a misnomer. Freon is a brand name for a single refrigerant product. Just like most facial tissue is called Kleenex, most refrigerants are called Freon. However, in both cases, Freon and Kleenex are brand names for a unique product but there are other brands of similar products that do the same job. There are a number of different possible refrigerant products that can be used for cooling. Whether you are cooling cars, or houses, or freezers, the application determines which refrigerant will do the best job.
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Cooling is created by a process of heat exchange. Another misconception is that objects can absorb cold. However, temperature differences only travel in one direction. Objects can only give up their heat to something cooler. Heat always travels away from something warm towards something cooler. An iced drink is cool because the heat in the beverage is being soaked up by the colder ice. Meat put in the freezer does not absorb cold, instead it gets the heat drawn out of it by the colder air inside the freezer. This is a law of physics that needs to be taken as a given for this lesson. There will be some more laws that we will also need to accept as givens which we will come to later.
As we said before, refrigerants are a medium of transfer for heat just like a bus is a medium of transport for people. The refrigerant in an A/C system circulates inside a closed loop, going from inside the passenger compartment of the car to the front of the car, outside near the radiator, and then back inside the car.
