Temperature records are soaring. Without a doubt, summers are plainly getting hotter. Now more than ever before, you need your mobile air conditioning system to work efficiently so that your pleasure craft or recreational vehicle can keep you cool during these scorching hot days. However, if you’re to enjoy that roving cooling effect, your AC evaporator will need some tender loving care.

Interpreting Your AC Evaporator’s Role

Like a modern vehicle radiator, this heat exchanger coil is full of liquid. But this isn’t water, it’s a fluid refrigerant. The standard refrigerants used in these systems today are R134a and R410a. Expect to find the latter fluid in heavy-duty commercial refrigeration systems and large travelling vehicles, such as recreational vehicles and yachts. At any rate, once you’ve finished thinking about refrigerant blends, it’s this fluid that absorbs the heat and cools the cabin. The fluid expands, evaporates, then it moves onto the next stage of this cycling cooling process.

Keep Your AC Evaporator Hale and Hearty

This component, by its very nature, produces wet and dirty waste. A fan is blowing inside a cowling. It’s sucking up dirt and humidity, and the evaporative heat exchanger can’t help but accumulate this airborne discharge. Look at the evaporator coil, its fins and aluminium-plated fluid channels. They’re efficient, but those nooks and crannies attract cooling water and dirt. First of all, then, debris should be removed from the fan inlet filter. That initial move is followed by a coil cleaning procedure. Freed from layers of accumulated dirt, the heat exchange mechanism now regains operational power.

Prevent Humidity Issues

The aluminium housing and copper tubes resist corrosion, so material fatigue isn’t a major problem. What about the water suspended in the atmosphere? Ambient moisture stops your breathing air from feeling uncomfortably dry, but humidity collects in and around the compact equipment’s evaporator coil. Not to worry, maintenance engineers are aware of such issues, which is why they check the drainage assembly and drain pan for clogging problems. Remember, if the water hangs around, system freeze-ups are possible, with the dripping water forming an icy skin around the evaporator tubes.

So why is evaporator maintenance a major consideration when you’re on the road or cruising open waters? Well, you’re an outdoorsman now, an adventurer. In turn, your AC system is accompanying you on that adventure. It’s mounted outside the vehicle cabin, exposed to nature’s dirt and wet, and yet it’s expected to keep you cool during all of your journeys. If that goal is to be realized, the filters and evaporator coil must remain clean and relatively dry.