Thermo Cube update
It
got down to 21 degrees last night, which prompted the Thermo Cube to turn on and use
.04 kilowatt hours of energy.
We've had some serious rain
this week, but no problems with the piled up dirt being eroded.
Makes me wonder if the mobile
home dirt anchors were over kill? Maybe just tilting the whole
thing back on an angle is enough to prevent a wash out?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Speaking as someone who, in the course of professional events, sometimes has to design walls that hold back soil, I can tell you that horizontal earth pressure is no small matter. Especially for something as tall as your fridge.
Now, depending on your tolerance for loss, you could get away with just tilting, but it's a balancing act. What you do with the tilt is move the center of weight further away from the overturning point, so it takes more horizontal push to topple the fridge forward. The anchors help by directly resisting the push of the soil with a pull of their own. Maybe you could have used smaller anchors, but, if I recall, one or both of them were salvaged, so it's not like you wasted money on something that was oversized.
So, tilt plus anchors. Is it a "belt and suspenders" approach? Could be. But homegrown, unfrozen veg throughout the winter? For years to come? I'd say making your system robust was worth it.