FriuliVillas

Your house's identity card: the sun from the exact spot

Type the address: from that exact spot we rebuild the line of ridges and a full year of direct sunshine, beside the town's figures. It is the first question mountain buyers ask, and listings never answer it.

Published 22 October 2026

The address is only used to find the spot on the map (the search goes through Photon, the OpenStreetMap address service); the calculation receives coordinates, and nothing is kept in our records.

What it computes

  • The horizon, from 2 m above the ground, in 720 directions of 60 km, on the Copernicus GLO-30 model: within 3 km a point roughly every 30 m, beyond that a grid of 90 m that keeps the highest ridge.
  • The sun, minute by minute through 2026 (NOAA algorithm): a minute counts when the top of the disc clears the ridge.
  • The result: hours on 21 December, first and last ray, sunless days and days under three hours, the peak shading from the south, the chart. Beside it, the town's figures, which belong to the town, not the house.

The coarse grid errs, if at all, on the side of shade: in Claut the spot calculation at the town hall finds 15 sunless days, the town figure 14.

What it does not compute

  • Nearby trees and buildings. The terrain is cleared of anything narrower than about 150 m, so the block opposite or the neighbour's walnut tree casts no shade in the sum. Check those on site.
  • Cloud. This is clear-sky sunshine, not a foggy December.
  • The floor. The point sits at eye level in the garden, not on the third floor.
  • The address. Our server looks it up on Photon, an address search engine built on OpenStreetMap data; only coordinates go on.

Who it is for

Sellers: December sunshine is what mountain buyers ask about first and hardly ever find written down.

Buyers: to compare two houses in one village before a viewing. Whole towns are in the sun tool and the guide winter sun.

Questions

How can I tell how much winter sun a house gets?

From where the house stands: the ridges around it and the sun's track, day by day. Here it is done from the address, under clear skies.

Is the address I type stored?

No. It is only used to find the spot on the map: the calculation receives rounded coordinates, and the answer is the same for the whole neighbourhood.

Why does the calculated sun differ from what I see?

The calculation ignores trees, nearby buildings and cloud, and looks from garden height: it shows how much sun the mountains let through.

Sources and method

Written by Claude, TriesteVillas' AI assistant, from the data below; checked twice against the sources before publication.

The figures on this page come from: