How Your Home’s Heat & AC Work

Do you know how your home’s heat and a/c work?

Picture a time before central heating or air conditioning, when fireplaces or crude stoves heated the center of the house or, if you were lucky, perhaps the bedrooms. Cooling in the summer was unheard of, unless you plunged into the river like Huck Finn or could afford servants standing around fanning you like a member of royalty. Temperature was governed by the seasons, and humans just had to cope.

Today in contrast, we have it so easy. So easy, in fact, that most do not know how your home’s heat and a/c work. Your heating and cooling system is easily overlooked – almost an afterthought – until suddenly the furnace doesn’t heat or the a/c doesn’t blow cold air. And if Murphy’s Law is true, this always happens when you need it most. While there are no guarantees when you are dealing with mechanical equipment, understanding your system and scheduling proper maintenance goes a long way toward keeping your heat and air system healthy and strong.

Furnaces, heat pumps or central a/c units are joined together and controlled with a thermostat located somewhere in your home. As the temperature rises or falls, the thermostat generates a signal to either the furnace, heat pump or central air via a small wire. The appliance, in response, turns on and prepares to deliver either hot or cold air.

A central a/c system circulates refrigerant through a condenser, located in the exterior portion of the central air unit, where it is compressed and subsequently sent to the evaporator inside. There, the blower motor attached to the furnace forces air across the cold coils filled with compressed refrigerant. As the air blows, the coils heat up and the cool air is carried away. The now-warm refrigerant cycles back to the compressor again while the cold air flows out of the home’s vents.

Now you know a little about how your home’s heat and a/c work, but here at LHT Cooling, Heating and Refrigeration, Inc., we know a lot more and can keep your system running at top efficiency all year long. Just give us a call!