I believe humidity in that area is of the sort that an evaporative cooler is just adding more moisture to the hot, wet air without actually cooling it any.
Well there goes that idea of lower power needs for basic summer cooling.
Swamp coolers are great where you can use them, but I don’t think most of the midwest and Texas are such places. I’d not heard of the concept at all until I moved to New Mexico, where it worked great - we didn’t even have refrigerated air.
My time in Iowa, when “80/80” was sort of gross and “90/90” was just hell… no swamp cooler can do a thing there beyond make it “100” and something.
I’ve got a Bonair swamp cooler attached to both the house and the shop, and they’re great. Most of the time in the summer it’s 20-30% humidity, and it’s terrific. by 35% there’s a noticeable decrease in what it can do, and by 40% it’s just a big fan and nothing else.
I’m pretty minimal when it comes to power backups right now - about 200w of hiking type solar panels and some lithium packs, to run emergency comms and lights. Freezer will get an emergency cook-through if I forsee a longer outage, otherwise we have a fairly deep dry pantry. Propane ‘Mr Buddy’ heater for a single room, if needed. Propane outdoor cooking if needed, or if I could source the power, an induction stove.
Once we get the greenhouse set up, I might put a kw of offgrid-style panels in that - but even then we’ll just run some power from it to the freezer. Also there’s a decent battery powered outlet once we get the PHEV.