Sun and Outlook for Each Home

Overview

How much sun does this home get in winter, and what does it look out on? For any apartment, floor by floor, measured from the design and the buildings around it. Use it to compare homes, pick a better layout, or describe a home on a sales sheet.

Where to Find It

Pick a unit and choose Sun and outlook, floor by floor, or pick a home in the floor plans. For each home, measured from its own floor:

• Sun: hours of direct sun on any of the living room's windows from 9 am to 3 pm on 21 June, 21 March and 21 December, and on the balcony or garden on 21 June, to the half hour. It counts this building, the site's other buildings and the buildings around within 500 m. A balcony's side walls and the slab above an inset balcony count too, so summer sun on a window can be less than winter's.
• Outlook: how far the living room looks, straight out and 40° either way, before a building taller than the eye. Over 500 m is called open. A park in the way is said (Vicmap's PPRZ and PCRZ zones).

This isn't a planning standard: it's for describing a home.

Heights of the buildings around: in the City of Melbourne, its measured heights. Elsewhere, Overture's where it has them, which is about one building in six. The rest are estimated: from the building's footprint (4.5 m under 80 m², 7 m under 400 m², 10 m under 1,500 m², 16 m above), or the median of at least three known buildings within 150 m, if that's taller. The result says how many are estimated.

How good that is: scored against the City's measured heights on 7,000 buildings in Kensington, North Melbourne and Carlton, an estimate is about 2.5 m out on average and tends to be low. Counting them all as one storey was 3 to 5 m out. In a dense centre without measured heights it can be far out (over 20 m in the CBD when tested without the City's data), so treat sun and outlook there as a first look. On four test blocks, a home's winter sun moved by 0.6 h or less, and Vicmap Buildings holds better heights if you need them.

Not counted: trees, the ground's slope, and buildings since built or gone. Existing buildings mostly on the site count as cleared.

Sources