Coefficient of performance

Coefficient of performance is a measure of how good something is at making things cold (like a fridge or an air conditioner).

Think of a toy car with a wind-up motor. When you wind it up, you put in some energy, right? Then the car moves around using that energy. The coefficient of performance is like the ratio of how much the car moves compared to how much energy you put in.

So, in the case of a fridge, we want to know how much heat (energy) it can remove from the inside of the fridge (making it cold) compared to how much energy we have to put in to run the fridge. The coefficient of performance is that ratio.

The higher the coefficient of performance, the more efficient the fridge is at turning the energy we put in into cool air. This means that it won't cost as much money to run and it's better for the environment.