What Puts the Chill in Your Phoenix Heating & Air Conditioning Service?

Where does the cold in your Phoenix Heating & Air Conditioning Service come from?  An AC system works by sucking the heat out of one environment and pushing it into another.  This key process of pumping heat is the responsibility of a piece of equipment known as the "chiller".  A very super technical name. So how might you ask, does a chiller work?  Well, there's tons of different ways the chiller can work.  We'll look at a couple of the more basic and common ones.

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In residential HVAC systems, the most common chiller works on vapor-compression.  This name is truthfully a little more technical, but the principle it works on is pretty simple.  All things have heat energy, how fast their particles are moving.  If you get the particles moving faster, the substance changes from a solid to a liquid to a gas.  This relationship between temperature and states of matter is at the heart of a vapor-compression chiller.  The chiller pumps out a refrigerant, usually Freon, in the form of a liquid.  This liquid travels through some piping that brings it to a fan inside your home.  Here the Freon picks up a lot of heat and changes into a gas.  The gas continues down the pipe until it gets back to the chiller.  The chiller takes the gaseous Freon and pushes it back into a liquid.  When it does this, it takes heat out from the Freon.  Cold liquid Freon then again leaves the chiller to go collect more of the hot from your house and leave you in a comfortable cool.  That's the most common form of chiller for most of your Phoenix heating & air conditioning service.

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Another basic chiller works very similarly.  The refrigerant evaporates to suck out heat, but this time the gas is absorbed into another liquid.  This liquid is later heated, which releases the refrigerant again as a hot gas.  Finally, the gas refrigerant cools down and condenses into a liquid, starting the cycle anew. This one is different from the last chiller because it uses the second liquid to help move the refrigerant and because it depends on another heat source. This kind of system is usually paired with a gas engine or other hot machine so that it can benefit from the waste heat of the other machine.

So that's a couple of the chiller you might hear about if you ask someone about Phoenix heating & air conditioning service.  Now you know.