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Hello and thanks for the ideas again. I actually bought a small swamp cooler from Amazon for Burning Man 2018 and I tested it at home. It died after testing it for 4 hours and I returned it. The air flow from it was pretty minimal also.

Also couple of years ago I built a small swamp cooler but in hindsight the fan was not powerful enough and the area to be cooled was too big (large tent) - it did nothing. Maybe that's why my faith in swamp coolers is limited.

I'm now experimenting. I got 2 high air flow CPU case fans and an infrared thermometer from Amazon. I'm going to test various materials and figure out with the thermometer what gives me the best evaporation and as a result, most powerful cooling.

Camper_Dan, if you don't mind me picking your brain a little bit more, I've looked into swamp coolers and this is where my brain crashes LOL - if my van air is cooler inside than it is outside, most instructions for swamp coolers tell me to pull hot air from inside and cool it via evaporation. Would it not make sense to circulate the air inside and cool the cooled air even further by evaporating more water? It just sounds weird to pull in hot air. Some cooler instructions rave how the swamp cooler drops the temperature by 20 degrees. Well if it's 110 degrees outside in Nevada desert, cooling the air to 90 degrees is not exactly a victory of epic proportions. Yes it helps but it's still hot.

Ice can be purchased at Burning Man so melting ice sounds like a better idea, I don't know? The topic is a little confusing. My initial thought was to just get a generator and blast AC. Some people say it works at Burning Man, others tell the generators fail due to high altitude (thin air, generator doesn't produce as much power) and/or dust in the engine. Also there are a lot of RVs with generators running all the time so I'm sure a lot of people still use it successfully.

Camper_Dan, thank you so much for your thorough answer. After doing some research, it really looks like running an actual AC is just not going to happen. I'll try some methods that you propose, your ideas are GREAT. I have time, my main goal is to take the van to Burning Man 2019 where cooling a vehicle is challenging. This year it got to 102 degrees and it was MUCH cooler than last year which was hell on earth between 10am and 7pm  - must've been 110 degrees, maybe more.

Thanks again! I'll post my findings here, maybe someone will find them useful later.

I will be getting a Dodge or Mercedes sprinter van, not a pre-built camper van that comes with A/C. It's frustrating that the technology exists, but not the amount of BTU / power usage I want. The only 1,000 BTU coolers I've found are for cooling computer servers and cost thousands

Is it possible to run a "real" air conditioner in a van conversion? I know it's easy to get a 5,000 BTU air conditioner that cools a room in a house but it seems difficult to find anything smaller - that would be an overkill in a van and huge power hog. I wish something like 500-1,000 BTU existed but I'm having hard time finding one. Has someone done this successfully?