A Carrier Residential AC Unit

Did you ever wonder how air conditioners work? It’s actually pretty amazing when you think about it. If you live in the Chicago area or in one of the Chicago neighborhoods like Wicker Park, Bucktown, Portage Park or Lakeview you know how hot the summers can get, especially around the peak months of June, July and August. Heck, even September the temperature can get into the 90’s.  When it gets this hot, most of us just turn on our AC units and within a matter of a few hours were all nice and cool without a second thought.

Have you ever heard of Carrier air conditioning units? Not many people know that we all owe our modern air conditioning systems to Willis Haviland Carrier who back in 1902 designed and built the first electrical air conditioner. The first air conditioners and refrigerators used toxic or flammable gases, such as ammonia, methyle chloride and propane. The problem with using these chemicals for refrigeration is that when they leaked the result was often fatal. For example, when ammonia leaks in a confined area or room it will rob that room of any oxygen in addition to being extremely toxic at those concentrations. Luckily, in 1928 Thomas Midgley Jr. came along and created the first chlorofluorocarbon gas called Freon which was non-flammable and much safer to handle.

The refrigerant called Freon has gone through many incarnations over the past 80 years with names like R-12, R-502 and R-22 as they exhibited different thermodynamic characteristics used for different applications such as commercial freezers, ice machines or residential air conditioning systems. Today, were currently phasing into a somewhat newer refrigerant called R-410a which uses less energy to air condition and contains no chlorine which is harmful to the ozone layer.

So back to the subject at hand, How Air Conditioners Work. The video I’m posting below explains very well how air conditioning systems remove humidity from the air and cool your home at the same time. Most people don’t know that air conditioners actually remove humidity which is a big part of why it feels so hot. Hope you enjoy and please leave a comment, we’d love to hear your feedback.