Your home air conditioners job is to move heat from inside your home to the outside, thereby cooling you and your home. Air conditioners pull the heat out of the air and they blow cool air into your home. The air is cooled by when it is blown over a set of cold pipes called an evaporator coil. This works just like the cooling that happens when water evaporates from your skin. The evaporator coil is filled with a particular fluid called a refrigerant, which changes from a liquid to a gas as it absorbs heat from the air. The refrigerant is pumped outside the house to another coil where it gives up its heat and changes back into a liquid. This exterior coil is called the condenser because the refrigerant is condensing from a gas back to a fluid just like moisture on a cold glass. The pump, called a compressor, is used to move the refrigerant between the two coils and to change the force of the refrigerant so that the entire refrigerant evaporates or condenses in the appropriate coils.
The energy to get all of this running is used by the motor that runs the compressor. The entire system will generally give about three times the cooling energy that the compressor uses. This odd little detail happens because the changing of refrigerant from a liquid to a gas and back again lets the system move much more energy than the compressor uses.
Nearly every air conditioning system has a filter upstream of the evaporator coil. This can be in the return grille or in special slots in the duct system and can be furry-looking or a folded paper filter. This filter removes particles from the air stream to both keep the air conditioning system clean and to remove particles from the air for a cleaner and cooler conditioned area.
As the filter does its job, it gets weighed down with more and more particles. This in fact has the effect of making it more efficient, but it also increases resistance and reducing airflow.
When this happens, it is time to change the filter. How long it will take to happen depends on how dirty the air is and how big the filter is. If you choose not to change the filter, the air flow will go down, and the system will not perform well. Not only that, but if the filter is too dirty, it starts to become a source or air pollution itself. If you were to take the filter out entirely, you would solve the low air flow problem, but this victory would be short lived. The particles that the filter would have taken out will now build up on your evaporator coil and eventually cause it to fail. A new filter is a lot cheaper than having to replace the coil later on as well.
For a proper functioning and cool air space get an air conditioner and live life at your own temperature. For an affordable and well designed air conditioners go to Centromac Refrigeration.