Is My House South Facing? How to Work Out Which Way Your Home Faces

You are standing in someone else's kitchen, looking out at the garden, while an estate agent tells you it is south facing. It is a sunny afternoon, so it seems believable. But is it? And if your own house has a south facing front, does that make your house south facing, or the opposite?

Every house faces two ways at once, front and back, which is the root of most of the confusion. Here is how to settle it for your own home in a few minutes, and what the answer actually means.

What People Mean by "South Facing"

When an estate agent, a gardener or a neighbour says a house is south facing, they nearly always mean the garden. The convention is simple: stand at the back door and look out into the garden. The direction you are looking is the direction the garden faces.

So a house with a south facing garden has its back to the south and its front door facing north. That is the arrangement most people want, because the house never casts its shadow over the garden. If someone describes the front of a house as south facing, the garden behind it faces north.

In practice, very few homes face exactly south. Listings use "south facing" fairly generously for anything between south east and south west, and occasionally beyond. It is always worth checking for yourself.

Three Quick Ways to Check

Use the Compass on Your Phone

Stand with your back flat against the rear wall of the house, or at the back door, and hold the phone flat in front of you, pointing out into the garden. The reading is the direction your garden faces. Keep away from cars, radiators and large appliances, which can pull the needle, and if the app asks you to calibrate by waving the phone in a figure of eight, do it. In the UK the difference between magnetic north and true north is currently only a degree or two, so you can ignore it.

Look at a Map

Open Google Maps or Apple Maps in satellite view, find your house and make sure north is at the top of the screen (tap the compass symbol if the map has rotated). If your garden is below the house on the screen, it faces south. Above means north, right means east, left means west.

Use the Sun

In the UK the sun is due south at around noon in winter and around 1pm in summer, when the clocks have gone forward. It is a little later the further west you live: in Plymouth, for example, roughly a quarter of an hour later than in London. At that moment, shadows point due north. Look at where the shadow of a fence post falls and you have your bearings without any technology at all.

If you want more detail, particularly for your roof rather than your garden, our guide on how to check which way your roof faces covers four methods step by step.

What the Sun Actually Does Around Your House

Knowing the direction only becomes useful once you know where the sun goes, and that changes a great deal with the seasons.

• Around midsummer, the sun rises in the north east before 5am, climbs high into the southern sky, and sets in the north west after 9pm. At midday in London it is about 62 degrees above the horizon.
• Around midwinter, it rises in the south east after 8am, crawls low across the south, and sets in the south west around 4pm. At midday in London it reaches only about 15 degrees, and in Edinburgh barely 11.

That low winter sun has a big effect on shadows. A typical two storey house is roughly 8 metres tall to the ridge. At midday in late June it casts a shadow about 4 metres long. At midday in late December, in London, that shadow stretches to around 30 metres, and in Edinburgh to more than 40. This is why a north facing garden can feel pleasant in July and spend most of the winter in shade.

What Each Direction Means Day to Day

• South facing garden: sun for most of the day, all year round, and no shadow from the house. The rooms at the back are brighter and warmer.
• North facing garden: the house shades the area nearest to it, heavily in winter. A long garden still gets sun at the far end. The front of the house gets the light instead, and the back rooms are cooler and more evenly lit, which is why artists traditionally preferred north light for studios.
• East facing garden: bright mornings and shade from mid afternoon. Good for breakfast outside, less good for evenings.
• West facing garden: shade in the morning, then sun from early afternoon into the evening. Many people who are out at work all day prefer this to south.

What It Means for Solar Panels

On most British houses the roof has two main slopes, one above the front and one above the back. That means the direction your garden faces is usually a direct clue about your roof. A south facing garden normally comes with a south facing rear roof slope, which is the best place in the country to put solar panels, and conveniently it is often out of sight from the street. A north facing garden normally means the good slope is at the front.

It is not always that simple. Hipped roofs slope on all four sides, so the side slopes may face east and west. Semi detached and end of terrace houses often have a hip at one end. Dormers, chimneys and rear extensions break up the space. And a roof can face a slightly different direction from the garden if the house sits at an angle on its plot.

The good news is that a roof does not need to face due south to be worth it. A slope facing anywhere from south east to south west produces around 93 to 100% of the best possible output, and east or west roofs still manage roughly 75 to 80%. Our guide to whether your roof needs to face south sets out every direction, and if your best slope faces north, read our guide to north facing roofs before ruling solar out.

The Quickest Way: Check by Postcode

If you would rather not stand in the garden waving your phone around, enter your postcode in our free tool. It finds your roof on a satellite map and shows its direction in degrees, along with an estimate of what solar panels could generate there. If it picks the wrong building, you can drag the pin onto your own house.