James \"Cubby\" Culbertson wrote:

... In terms of Swamp vs. Refrigerated, well that's a debate. I live in
Albuquerque and the swamp cooler is OK but not great. The last few years
has seen higher than normal humidities so at night it struggles.

You might try a different configuration with better controls, eg turn on
the swamp to cool recirculated house air when the indoor temp rises to 80 F
and turn on a small exhaust fan when the indoor RH rises to 65%.

This works in Melbourne Australia...

We tried out your split-cycle swamp cooler idea a couple of nights ago
using a jerry-rigged humidistat using a SHT11 and a computer to control
the exhaust fan, and the brains of a commercial refrigerative split-cycle
system for the swamp cooler. We closed all the windows (against standard
practice with swamp coolers) and ran the swamp cooler to a fixed temp
(22C) and the humidistat to a fixed humidity (65% at your suggestion).
That night it was 28C and 35% outside.

It was very effective. It would shut off for maybe 10 minutes, then run
for 2. the fan didn't always come on, making me suspect that the vapour
was leaking out other ways.

I discussed it in the tearoom the next day (we have our own little frugal
living research group who meet in the tearoom in csse.monash.edu.au) and
people were surprised it worked, but I did the maths on the whiteboard and
they were sold. We then pondered the idea of a central attrium with a
full floor to ceiling waterfall for cooling and humidiexhaust fans around
the perimeter of the house. Very low power, and everyone liked the idea
of a waterfall in the loungeroom (particularly with adjustable flow/noise
rate).

Nick