They're more efficient when in a cool spot for sure. Easiest thing is to have them on the eastern side of the house so they're shaded in the afternoon. You'd run into the issue you said trying to duct air from somewhere cooler plus the energy loss of moving all that air further.

Pulling air from a basement would cause more hot air to be drawn into the house from outside to make up the difference, so that would be less effective. Pulling from a crawlspace would also result in hot air being pulled under the house and heating it from below. About the only other thing I could think, if you have easy access to free, clean water in a not-humid environment would be to spray water on the coils to benefit from evaporative cooling. You'd have to clean it more often since mold and funk would grow on it and block the coils over time.

>>3013526
It generally doesn't matter that much because of how much air they move. If you have a large shaded area and a large sunny area to choose from, the shaded will be marginally better.
>duct
Absolutely not, you will lose much more on air flow reduction.
>pulling air from [anywhere in the house]
You are depositing the heat back into the building. Literally shooting yourself in the foot.

The only solid source of cold air you could hook it up to would be buried pipes underground at ~1m+ depth, away from the house. However if you are willing to put in so much work, you're better off converting it to run from water and burying water pipes. Still takes a lot of area and a lot of digging to do this. Could be a hobby project if you have an excavator.

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>>3013526

>>3013526
this is how you say "I don't know how AC works" without saying it.

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>>3013526

>>3013548
makes sense, the AC units should be able to handle the "swamp" factor of the coolers.

But seems like THAT setup should be ducted.