We believe that prospective house buyers care about the sunniness of the property they’re considering. For instance, they would probably like to know when the latest sunset of the year occurs. And the earliest sunrise?
Sunrise and sunset times can be found on many web sites, but they don’t take shading from nearby hills and mountains into account. And in mountainous regions that matters a lot. So with our background in meteorology, we thought: why don’t we just compute it?
Almost a year later, we’ve now set up a free web site where you can enter any address worldwide, and we’ll compute the actual horizon in a second or two. Here’s what it looks like for the best hotel in the world (according to TripAdvisor):
The picture is taken from the web page that we’ve created specifically for the Grand Hotel Kronenhof in Pontresina, Switzerland, and it shows the 360-degrees horizon as it would look like from the hotel. The path that the sun follows on 21 June 2014 is also shown, along with a table with the key “sun facts” for that day.
You can get a similar page for your own house, cabin, hut, favorite lookout spot or anywhere in the world. Click here to search for it!
You get all the key facts (latest sunrise, average number of sun hours, the number of sun hours that are “lost” due to terrain shading etc.), and we also compute your sun index. This is simply the percentage of sun that you get compared to what you would get if the horizon was completely flat. If the sun index is 50 %, the terrain “steals” half your potential sunlight. We also break down the sun index into monthly values and we compute it separately for the morning and the afternoon.
Here’s what (the top part of) our “location views” look like:
All this for free. We plan to sell PDF modules for agents to use in their brochures, but for personal users, such as house owners or house buyers, our web site is completely free to use. Why, you may ask. It took us a loooong time to compute all this, but for now we just want as many people as possible to know about this. So go ahead and share this on Facebook or Twitter if you like what we’re doing. Thanks!
suncurves 