Feng Shui Floor Plan
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Method and assumptions

Feng shui is not one system. Different schools disagree, sometimes flatly. So this page sets out exactly which one these tools follow, what we compute, and which parts are our own judgement rather than anybody's tradition.

Two traditions, kept apart

Most of this site is Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai): it works from your birth year to a number from 1 to 9, and from a building's sitting direction to a chart of eight sectors. The bedroom generator, the Kua calculator and the compass bagua map are all Eight Mansions.

One tool is not. The bagua map is the three-door layout — the nine squares lined up with the front door, taught in the West since the 1980s and often called BTB or Black Sect. It ignores the compass entirely, which is exactly what makes it fast, and it reaches different conclusions from the compass method about the same home.

We build both because both are in wide use and people arrive looking for each. What we do not do is blend them. Each tool says at the top which tradition it is running, the two link to each other, and no page averages one into the other. A map that splits the difference between them belongs to neither and would be ours alone.

We do not use Flying Star (玄空飛星), San He (三合) or San Yuan (三元) at all. Those need information we do not ask for — the year a building was completed, its precise facing on a 24-direction compass. If you want a Flying Star reading, this is the wrong site and we would rather say so.

Two different year boundaries, and why

The Chinese year does not begin on 1 January, and the tools on this site do not even agree with each other on when it begins — because the two traditions genuinely differ:

So in 2026 the Kua year turns on 4 February but the animal does not change from Snake to Horse until 17 February. Someone born on 10 February 2026 is a Snake by zodiac and already in the new year by Kua. Both statements are correct; they answer different questions.

Lichun times are precomputed for 1900–2100 from astronomical data and stated in UTC+8. If your birthday falls on the lichun day itself, the hour decides which year you belong to, and the calculator will ask for it rather than guess.

Where the direction tables come from

We do not transcribe a table from a book or a website. Copying tables by hand is how errors spread, and we found errors in both a published table and an open-source library while building this.

Instead the tables are generated from the rule that produces them. Each of the eight directions corresponds to a trigram of three lines. Compare your own trigram with the trigram of a direction, see which lines differ, and the pattern names the relationship: only the top line differs, and it is Sheng Chi; only the middle, and it is Jue Ming; and so on for the remaining six.

Because flipping the same lines twice returns you to where you started, the whole table has to be symmetric — if your Jue Ming direction is Southwest, then a person seated in the Southwest must have Jue Ming pointing back at you. Our test suite enforces that symmetry, along with the requirement that Fu Wei is always your own trigram's direction. Those two checks alone caught every error we found in the sources we compared against.

Two charts: yours and the building's

Eight Mansions produces two separate charts and they answer different questions. Getting these the wrong way round is the most common error we see in free calculators.

A house is named after its sitting side, which is the opposite of its facing side. A house facing south sits north, and that makes it a Kan house. Both charts are then produced by the same line-change rule described above — the only difference is which trigram you start from.

Eight Mansions itself uses the eight 45° palaces, and that is what the house chart runs on. Because the palaces are 45° wide their edges fall at 22.5°, 67.5° and so on, and a bearing two degrees off can move the whole chart into the neighboring palace — 22° reads as a Li house and 24° as a Kun house, which are in opposite groups. The tool warns when your bearing is within three degrees of an edge, and that warning matters more than anything else on the page.

The annual layer is the one place we go finer, to the 24 mountains of 15° each. That is not a different school — it is the same compass read at higher resolution — and the annual positions genuinely need it. In 2027 the three Sha sit in the Shen, You and Xu mountains, which straddle three different palaces. Saying "the three Sha are in the west" is the palace-level summary; the actual arc is 232.5° to 307.5°.

Which room goes where

Rooms you occupy for hours belong in the four favored sectors; rooms nobody lingers in are better placed in the four weak ones, on the reasoning that a favored sector spent on a bathroom is wasted. That much is settled across sources, and it is what the sector tool reports.

The kitchen is not settled. One line of practice puts the stove in a weak sector deliberately so that fire burns off what is there; another treats the kitchen as a daily-use room that wants a good sector like any other. Neither is a minority position, so we report the split instead of picking one. Both sides do agree on a separate point: the stove mouth should face one of the occupant's own good directions, which uses your chart rather than the house's.

Where your chart and the house chart disagree — which happens on all eight sectors when you and the building are in opposite groups — there is nothing inside Eight Mansions that resolves it. We show both columns and leave the choice with you rather than averaging two charts into a number that means nothing.

The annual layer is almanac, not Eight Mansions

Tai Sui, Sui Po and the three Sha do not come from Eight Mansions. They come from the stem-branch calendar and are used alongside whichever school you follow, which is why they appear in almanacs that take no position on schools at all. We include them and label them as what they are.

They are derived, not copied. Tai Sui is the mountain of the year's own branch; Sui Po is the mountain directly opposite; the three Sha are the run of three mountains centered on the branch opposite the peak of the year's combination group. That last rule is the one worth stating in full, because it is where transcribed tables go wrong: the Wood group peaks in the East, so a Wood-group year puts its three Sha in the West. Our tests check all four groups against the traditional formula for every year from 1900 to 2100.

These positions turn at the start of spring, not at Chinese New Year, so between the two dates the year's directions have changed while the zodiac animal has not. How wide that window is differs every year, and which of the two comes first is not fixed either: across 1900–2100 the two fall on the same day in 6 years, Chinese New Year comes first in 92 of them — by as much as fourteen days — and the start of spring comes first in the rest, by up to sixteen. Both boundaries are right. Each page says which one it used.

We do not include the annual flying star, the five yellow, or anything else from Xuan Kong. Those belong to a school we do not run.

The advice attached to these positions is narrow and we keep it narrow: avoid breaking ground, demolishing or renovating in them for the year. Nobody in the tradition suggests you stop using a room, and we are not going to inflate it into something larger.

Kua 5

The arithmetic can produce 5, which has no trigram or direction of its own. Following standard practice we substitute 2 for men and 8 for women. Some teachers handle this differently.

The ranking is ours, not tradition

This is the part to be most sceptical about. Tradition says a direction is Sheng Chi or Jue Ming; it does not attach numbers to those, and it does not say how to weigh "the headboard is under a window" against "the head points the wrong way."

We needed some ordering to sort positions, so we made one up. That is why the results show you the individual findings — headboard against a solid wall, in line with the door or not, which direction the head points — instead of a single score. The findings are what you can check. The order they arrive in is our opinion.

Bedroom rules we check

Alongside direction, the bedroom tool checks placement rules that are consistent across Eight Mansions sources: a solid wall behind the headboard, not directly in line with the door, not under a window, not sharing the headboard wall with a bathroom, no beam overhead, and walking room on both sides. Where a room makes these impossible, the tool says which one it had to give up rather than silently picking something.

What we do not offer

No face reading, no photograph upload, no predictions about health, money or relationships. These systems describe direction and placement. Anything else on a site like this would be a different product wearing the same clothes.

That restraint applies most to the three-door bagua, where the area names are themselves life outcomes — wealth, fame, love. We will tell you where that tradition puts each area and what it associates with it. We will not tell you that clearing a corner changes your income, because that claim has no test attached and we have no way to check it.

Getting your bearings right

Every result depends on which way your room actually faces, and phone compasses are often several degrees off indoors — steel, wiring and speakers all pull the reading. Take the bearing from a doorway or window rather than the middle of the room, and take it twice. If the two readings disagree, the tool's output disagrees with itself too.