lawless89 said:
they actually only add 2% humidity to the air. So if it's 90% humidity, the difference is minimal.
RH is a measure of air's capacity to hold moisture, not the amount of moisture in the air. When the air is that close to saturation, it simply can't evaporate much water, so evaporative cooling won't make that much difference.
Evaporative cooling will increase RH significantly (not that it really means anything since RH is a pointless metric). Take extreme design (99.9%) conditions for Houston, the cooling design point is 94 F at 47% RH (77 F wet bulb). Wet bulb is the limiting factor here. Assuming an evaporative efficiency of 75% for a 6" pad, you'll end up with an exit temperature of around 81 F and the coincident RH will be 84%.
The only time it's 90% RH anywhere is just before or after the air temperature has cooled to the dewpoint. It's certainly not in the heat of the day when you'd be using evaporative cooling.
As a general comment, evaporative cooling works just fine in humid climates if you couple it with air movement. Every single commercial animal housing system (chickens, turkeys, swine, dairy) in the Southeast US uses it because it works.
The biggest issue in this application is that you don't have adequate cfm to cool the "space" and your distribution will be terrible. You'd probably be just as good to get a high pressure fogging system and multiple smaller fans.