Sunday project: I built that evaporative cooler in a bucket I was talking about earlier. The original was intended to run on 12V power, but our camp is going to have a generator, so I substituted an AC fountain pump and a bathroom exhaust fan for the harder-to-find 12V units they picked out. The local home depot does not stock swamp cooler pads (“DuraCool”), so I made do with a cut-to-fit furnace filter.

Seems to work OK, though the air here is not dry enough for the cooling effect to show up that much. Still, it was about an hour’s labor and $70 worth of parts, so it’s at least a worthwhile experiment.