How much winter sun a Carpathian plot gets, and how to check it in summer

People usually buy land in the Carpathians after a summer viewing. In June the midday sun over Kosiv sits roughly 65 degrees above the horizon and lights up any slope. In late December it gets to about 18 degrees, rising in the south-east and setting in the south-west. A ridge that looks like a nice view in July can block the sun for hours a day in winter, or for the whole day. We worked out what that means for five villages in the Kosiv district, and for five spots around a single village. The spread was wider than most locals would guess.

What decides whether a plot sees the sun in December?

One angle: how high the land rises above the horizon to the south of the spot where you stand. The noon sun height is easy to work out. On the winter solstice it is 90 degrees minus your latitude minus 23.4. Kosiv is at about 48.3 degrees north, so you get roughly 18 degrees. By early February it is about 24 degrees, and by early March about 33. If the hill to the south is taller than that, the sun is behind it.

The figures below come from PVGIS, a free tool run by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. It draws the horizon for any point from a digital terrain model. We took the point Wikipedia gives as the centre of each village and counted the minutes the sun clears the real horizon on 21 December and on 1 February. For comparison, on flat ground at this latitude the sun is up for about eight hours on 21 December.

Pistyn and Kuty sit closer to the foothills, where the skyline is low. Sokolivka lies in a valley, and the hill south of the village centre rises higher than the December noon sun. Light gets in only through a gap in the terrain, so the centre has a little over three hours of direct sun on the shortest day instead of eight.

Why a village average tells you little about your plot

Because the horizon changes within a few hundred metres. We took the centre of Sokolivka and four more points about 600 metres north, south, east and west of it. Same village, same roads, often the same asking price per hundred square metres.

The point to the north sits on a slope that faces south and behaves almost like open ground. The point to the west is on a north-facing slope. The land to its south rises 26 degrees, so direct sun does not come back until March, when the noon sun climbs past 30. Those two spots are just over a kilometre apart.

Checking a specific plot in PVGIS in ten minutes

All you need is the plot's coordinates. You can get them from the public cadastral map using the cadastral number, or drop a pin in Google Maps and copy the two numbers. The interface is in English and has only a few buttons that matter here.

1. 1Open PVGISGo to re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools. Under the map there is a Lat/Lon field: enter the latitude and longitude and press Go!.
2. 2Keep terrain shading onOn the right, under Use terrain shadows, Calculated horizon should be ticked. It is ticked by default.
3. 3Press Visualize resultsLeave the other fields alone. They are about solar panels, and all you want here is the horizon chart.
4. 4Find the Outline of horizon chartIt is a circle marked with the compass points. The grey area is the height of the land around the point, and the finely dotted line is the sun's path in December.
5. 5See where the December line runs into the greyWherever the sun's line is inside the grey area, the sun is behind the hill. If that is true for the whole stretch from south-east to south-west, the point gets no direct sun in December.

Check the spot where the house would go, two or three spots around it, and the access road. As the table above shows, a hundred metres can change the picture.

The on-site check: a phone and an outstretched arm

On a summer visit the sun is in a different place, but the hills are the same. So you can judge winter shading in any season if you know where to look and what angle to look for.

• Stand where the living room windows would be and open the compass on your phone. In December the sun moves only between about 127 and 233 degrees, from south-east through south to south-west. Hills to the north don't matter in winter.
• Measure the angle to the top of the ridge to the south. Any inclinometer app or a spirit level app with a tilt mode will do: line the edge of the phone up with the ridge. If it reads more than 18 degrees due south, there will be no direct sun at noon in late December.
• No app? A fist held at arm's length covers about 10 degrees of sky. If the ridge to the south is two fists above the horizon, it is taller than the December sun.
• If you happen to view in December or January, look at the neighbours' roofs. Snow that stays on a south-facing roof slope for weeks after a snowfall often means the sun never reaches it.
• Allow for the trees. Spruces on the boundary keep growing, and in ten years their shadow may be longer than it is today.

What a plot without winter sun changes in your decision

Shade does not make a plot useless. It changes what the plot is good for and what winter will cost. These are the points to weigh before you pay a deposit.

For a summer place, December shade hardly matters, and such a plot can be a sensible buy if the price reflects it. For a house you live in all year, or a cottage you want to let in the ski season, it matters a lot. We looked at how a slope eats into usable land in how much land you need for a mountain house, and at running costs in heating a house without gas.

Where you put the house can win back hours of sun

On a large plot, moving the house 30 to 50 metres up the slope sometimes gives more winter sun than any window layout. The hill to the south stays as tall, but the angle to it gets smaller as you climb. Run two or three points inside the plot through PVGIS before you order a design and a foundation. In construction, this is the cheapest decision to get right, because it costs nothing at the siting stage.

When you browse land for sale in the Carpathians, ask us for the coordinates of the plots you like, and you can compare their winter horizon before you travel. The other checks, from the cadastre to access, are in how to check a land plot in the Carpathians.