My idea for keeping jars of food cold using piped water… will it work?

I have an idea…

We have a 2” pipeline bringing water to the house with a combination of solar pump and gravity. The water comes from a mountain stream and is always lovely and cool.

Reading about old ‘spring boxes’, where food is kept cool by cold flowing water, I wonder if there is a way to take this idea, and modify it so that instead of a spring, I am using the pipe, which then fills a small trough holding bottles of milk etc, before the water makes its way towards the animals and irrigation.

The water wouldn’t constantly be running, only when I am irrigating or when the animals are drinking lots, so mostly on the hottest days.

How can I make this idea into reality? Would it work if it’s not constantly flowing? And are there improvements that could be made (e.g. thermal mass around it) that would help?

If I got a trough with a hole on both sides of it (with the outflow pipe lower than the intake one), could I have a float valve regulating the intake of the pipe, and the outflow pipe going to irrigation and animal water, and would that work seamlessly enough to run a garden sprinkler, or is that going to stop and start all the time and cause problems?

Has anyone considered or tried this kind of idea before? How did you/would you go about it? Does anyone know exactly what fittings I’d need?

Pipe is currently 2” poly, with a ball valve and a 1/2” fitting on the end of it.

Is it possible to mimic the stream by running the system 24/7 and putting the water back into the stream.

I would think using thermal mass inside and insulation outside would work. The fellow in California who is an itinerant shepherd, made a felted "cooler box" which he keeps cool simply with the evaporation of water like a swamp cooler. I've done similar when camping by putting a wet cotton towel over top of my commercial cooler box, but cotton tends to get smelly after 4-6 days.

Your idea is totally doable - it's a matter of taking some temperature readings and looking at your water usage patterns and figuring out how to get the best bang for the inputs. For example, is the input pipe buried or just on the surface? Would insulating it keep the water temperature higher on the way to your cold box?

It will also make a difference how warm the food is when it goes into the box. Having two boxes in series - things already cold go into the upstream box, things that are warm go into the downstream box for a "cooling off" period before moving to the colder box for storage. That way you won't risk warming up already cool food, if that makes sense?

  I think this is called a spring house.  Kind of a root cellar with water flowing through it.  I would think it could be easily done smaller in an insulated box.  An old chest freezer would be great.  

A small continuous leak would be easy to control.  How much water do you have?  I would rather over flow the water continuously then depend on the water use down stream.  Water has a lot of cold in it.   You would need very little over flow water  (1 pint of 50° water will cool 2gal milk from 75° to 55° in 1 hour) and then you have a water garden just downhill a bit.

If you need all the water for irrigation then my method would be large PVC pipe, In the side of the freezer box and wrapped all the way around (2X?) and back out next to the input.  Every time you use water it will cool the box.  Since it is pressurized pipe, no float valve or water leak.  I know I have seen several pix of this type of system.  The one I remember had a garden hose coiled in the bottom of a freezer box.  

Tom.