Portable cooling

I wonder if anyone has experience with portable evaporation coolers?  I'm interested to add such for cooling my cars' interior during nights when I sleep in it.

AP

Never bought one. Never lived with one. Visited a LOT of friends' houses with it in years past. Worked in a few warehouse type settings with it a few times.

GREAT cooling in dry climates. Cheap and reliable.

Not sure how much relative humidity reduces the cooling or how fast. But if it just rained and the sun comes out (I know that's not overnight sleep sessions), swamp coolers almost make it worse. It's a double-whammy: less cooling effect AND the humidity impairs your own sweaty body's cooling efforts.

For nighttime use I would definitely try it. One of my worst night's sleep was one July at about 2,200 ft altitude and probably 8% relative humidity. But it didn't cool below 80°F until about 2 a.m.. A battery-pack swamp cooler would have been really, really nice that night.

Not portable... or modern, but many years ago I worked in building maintenance. We had a theater that didn't have AC, only nozzles that sprayed a mist of water in the airstream. As GrumpyOldMan said, it worked pretty good on low humidity days. Not so well if the dew point was 70. The building broke ground October 1, 1929. There was a little unpleasantness  later that month and even into the 60's, parts of the building were unfinished because of lack of money. It was an interesting way to pay for college.

Aircraft pilots sometimes use these to cool down the cabin of their aircraft.  Not “evaporative” cookers but they work.  

https://www.mypilotstore.com/MyPilotStore/sep/9983?var=9986&gclid=Cj0KCQjwgMqSBhDCARIsAIIVN1WpZsQdRvm7ajlTqRfcFr2lT6fIgXs179-rZDTvaM2nu6IpzsW4WAIaAhTFEALw_wcB

A system like this could be an option

https://competitionmotorsport.com/coolshirt-complete-club-system-all-in-one


The problem with any kind of evaporative cooler is the humidity you're adding to the air.

It might take some cobbling to use in a car, but I bet you could drop your core temp enough to sleep with one of those ice water pump setups usually used for knee surgery recovery.

If it's not a gas hog I'd be tempted to keep her running through the night. 1,000rpm under no load isn't going to use much fuel and you've got full A/C and electric.