Although you might not think that you need to know how an air conditioning unit works, it can be handy in case something goes wrong. When you have an idea how your unit works, you’ll be able to look into things in a little more depth if it stops working and perhaps be able to highlight what the problem is. If your air conditioning unit stops working as it should then you’ll be able to see what the symptoms of the problems are and this should hopefully point you in the right direction of what could have gone wrong.

The process requires an indoor unit, an outdoor unit (the pump) and piping to connect both. Through the piping the refrigerant flows from one unit to another. It is the refrigerant that absorbs the energy in one unit and releases it in the other.

The first part of your air conditioning unit is the indoor evaporator. This is where a fan blows the warm air from the room into the unit. The warm air then passes over a heat exchanging coil which contains cold refrigerant. This then cools the air and allows the cooled air to be blown back into the room and the cycle begins again.

Inside the unit you will have a set of copper pipe work and it is this which helps to move the refrigerant throughout the unit and keep everything cool. You also have an outdoor condensing unit. The refrigerant gas in the system is heated and then the outdoor unit can help to make sure that the heated air is released unto the direction of the indoor evaporator in order to cool the air. You’ll also need some liquid refrigerant which flows through to the indoor unit.

It can seem very confusing unless you know what you are doing. If you have an old air conditioning unit then it can be worth taking this apart and having a look inside. Once you realise which part does what it becomes much easier to understand. The basic idea of a unit like this is that warm air from the room is taken into the unit, it is passed over a number of copper pipes which cool the air and take away the heat and then the new, cooler air is pushed back into the room. When you look at it like that, it becomes much easier to understand.

If your air conditioning unit stops working for any reason then the first thing you can check is that the air is flowing through as it should. Sometimes dirty pipes and blocked air filters can mean that the air doesn’t flow as it should and therefore does not get cooled. If you check all of this and there still seems to be a problem then it could be worth calling out someone to take a look at this for you. There are a few issues that could cause your unit to stop working as it should, but lots of these are also relatively easy to rectify.