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They work great if it's not humid out. Like in AZ right up until the monsoon hits, you can keep a house in the low 70s with swamp cooling* even when it's 100 outside, but once humidity jumps up to 30-40%, suddenly it's 80+ inside…
* Mind you, that is a full sized roof unit.
That's the problem with NY... It may not get to 100° all the time, but it regularly stays 90°+ and it is ALWAYS 45%rh or more...
Working in an open air factory in NY summers is brutally suffocating...
Humidity is 60-80% here today. At least there is a little bit of wind right now.
mmm mould spores. I live in the UK where its way too humid to consider trying this inside. Pumping water through silicone pipes around my legs and a reservoir with an ice bottle in it did an alright job to help cool off after exercise though. Not sure how sustainable it would be to run long term, think I need another source of cool.
I have wondered how cool the ground is if you dug down 50cm or so and put the pipes there to cool down. But at that point I would be using a huge amount of pipes to get it anywhere with no idea if it would even work very well.
It works quite well, but you might need to dig deeper than that depending on your soil conditions. If you have the time and room to dig, you should watch Tech Ingredients video on it:
"Turning a $150 AC Into a Super-Efficient Geothermal Unit!"
YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-41UF02vrU
Non YT: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=s-41UF02vrU
So TLDR is you are cooling the hot side of it with water and then that water goes through the pipes underground. As its even hotter you are going to lose more temp to the ground - realistically you wouldn't even have to go as deep for something like this surely? Though you do want a decent surface area for all the pipe.
I did have this sort of thought a while back, but I was thinking of getting a water source heat pump instead and found not many options. Modifying a cheap unit may not be too hard, shitloads of silicone and some boards around as much of the hot part as possible.
I have wondered how cool the ground is if you dug down 50cm or so and put the pipes there to cool down.
i believe a few meters down it's a constant 10-15 °C, they do use it in "ground heat exchangers", cool in the summer, warmer in the winter
A few meters down is a lot to dig with a spade compared to 50cm which is still quite a bit of digging really.
I do wonder what kind of temperature the water in a pond would be and if I could use that to dump heat into from my house.