How to Find True North in Your Home, Accurately
How to find true north in your own home
Everything in Vastu is measured from one number: the direction your building faces. Get that number wrong by fifteen degrees and every zone shifts by most of a sector. Your north-east is now someone else's north. The advice that follows will be internally consistent, carefully reasoned, and about a different house.
This is the most common reason people conclude that Vastu "does not work". It worked fine. The compass did not.
Why your phone compass is not enough
Phone compasses are magnetometers. They are genuinely clever and they are genuinely easy to fool.
They point at magnetic north. Magnetic north is not true north, and the gap between them is called declination. In the UK it is currently small — roughly zero to two degrees depending where you stand — but it moves every year, and in other markets it is not small at all. In parts of the US it exceeds ten degrees. A ten degree error moves you half a zone.
They are pulled by everything around them. A magnetometer cannot tell the difference between the Earth's magnetic field and the field from the steel lintel above your window. Indoors, the things that throw a reading include:
- Steel beams, lintels and reinforced concrete
- Electrical wiring in the walls and under the floor
- Underfloor heating, which is a grid of heating element
- Radiators, boilers and any large appliance
- Speakers, which contain substantial magnets
- The phone's own case, if it has a magnetic closure or a MagSafe ring
They drift. If you have ever seen a map application ask you to wave your phone in a figure of eight, that is the compass admitting it has lost calibration.
None of this makes a phone compass useless. It makes it a rough check, not a measurement you should build a correction schedule on.
The method that actually works
Read the building from above.
A satellite image shows your property photographed against a known geographic grid. There is no steel to deflect, no declination to correct for, and no calibration to lose. You find your building, line a Vastu wheel up with the wall you treat as the front, and read the bearing off the wheel.
This is what the Direction Finder does, and it is free. Put in a postcode, pan until your roof is under the crosshair, rotate the wheel until its reference line runs along your front wall, and the tool tells you which of the sixteen zones every part of the building sits in.
Nothing you type into it is sent anywhere. It runs in your browser.
Which wall is the "front"?
This trips people up more often than the compass does.
The reference wall is the main facade of the building — the wall containing the principal entrance, as the building was designed. It is not:
- The door you personally use most, if that is the back door
- The wall your garden faces
- The side you park on
In a terrace, the front is the street elevation. In a block of flats, use the main entrance of the block for the building's orientation, then read your own flat as a plan within it. On a corner plot with two street-facing walls, the front is the one the original front door sits in, even if a later owner bricked it up and put a new door in the side.
If the building has genuinely been remodelled so that the original entrance no longer exists, use the wall the building was designed to present. A surveyor's plan or the oldest photograph you can find will settle it faster than an argument will.
If you want to use a physical compass anyway
Sometimes you do, and a good baseplate compass is a fine instrument. Use it properly:
- Go outside. Stand in the open, away from the building, parked cars, metal railings and manhole covers. A compass taken in the middle of a living room is a compass reading the living room.
- Stand at least five metres from the facade, facing it squarely.
- Hold it flat, at waist height, away from your phone, keys, belt buckle and watch.
- Take three readings from three positions. If they disagree by more than a couple of degrees, something nearby is interfering. Move further out.
- Correct for declination. Look up the current figure for your postcode — the British Geological Survey publishes it — and apply it. In the UK it will be small. Apply it anyway; it costs nothing and it is the difference between a measurement and an estimate.
Then check the result against the satellite reading. If they agree, you are confident. If they do not, trust the satellite.
How precise do you actually need to be?
Each of the sixteen zones is 22.5 degrees wide. That gives you more room than you might expect: an error of three or four degrees will usually leave every room in the zone it was already in.
The danger is the boundary. If a room sits close to the edge between two zones, a small error moves it into the next one and the advice flips. A kitchen that is "in the south-east" by one degree is not something to act on confidently.
So the honest rule is this: be precise to within two or three degrees, and be suspicious of any room that lands near a boundary. If something sits on an edge, treat it as uncertain and look at the rooms that are unambiguously placed first. There is almost always plenty to do among those.
A quick sanity check
Once you have a bearing, test it against something you already know.
Where does the sun come up in your house? If your reading says your bedroom is in the east and that room has never seen a sunrise, the reading is wrong. The sun rises roughly east and sets roughly west, shifting north in summer and south in winter. It will not give you 22.5 degree precision, but it will catch an error of ninety.
Where is the coldest, dimmest corner of the property in winter? In the northern hemisphere it tends to be the north side. If your reading puts your sunniest room in the north, go back and check which wall you called the front.
Write the number down
Once you have it, record it somewhere you will find it again: the bearing in degrees, which wall you measured from, and the date.
Every future decision about the property refers back to it. Where the heavy furniture goes, which corner stays clear, where a correction object is placed — all of it is measured from that one figure. People redo this measurement three times over a year because they did not write it down, and each time they get a slightly different answer and lose a little more confidence in the whole exercise.
One number, written down, checked once properly.
Then look at your north-east
With the bearing settled, there is one thing worth doing immediately: find the north-east corner of your home and look at what is in it.
In British housing it is usually the coldest, darkest corner, which is exactly why it tends to collect the boiler, the understairs cupboard, the recycling, or the boxes nobody has unpacked. The north-east is the zone that asks to be light, open and uncluttered, and it is the fault we find more often than any other.
Clearing it costs nothing and is the single most common correction in our reports.
Open the Direction Finder — free, runs in your browser, and nothing you enter is stored or sent. Find your bearing, then read every zone against your own roofline.