Shadowing on the house

We got a notice of a proposed development next door.  And I am sad.  The shadow diagram looks like this:


As you can see the shadowing is pretty severe on the courtyard!  And the solar panels we put in just over a month ago.  *waaaah*.  But worse is when I scrolled down and saw this:


I added the blue arrows.  Somehow they are filling to be above our floor level.  Note that I think our floor level is a bit higher than that as we have a bearers and joist construction.  But if we use that diagram as an indication then our roofline is covered and looks like our whole courtyard is covered in shadow at 9am and 3pm!

I wailed, ranted, stressed and then Googled.  And found a solar diagram calculation website which was fabulous.  Ugly but functional.  Very functional.  http://www.findmyshadow.com/

It shows the shading based on heights.  So I plugged in some heights (they use a strange measure so I had to put in 90 for 9 metres and 100 for 10 metres).

I have called council and had a chat and will be putting in a submission.  For anyone else who has shadowing issues or just wants to do their own calculation of shadowing when building a new home check out Find My Shadow.  It's a free service and you can plug in the winter solstice and work out the effect on your home.  Here's a screenshot for our place at 9.15am on June 21 (the longest day of the year):

We played around with it and worked out from mid April to end of August it's going to suck in our courtyard in the morning.  And it looks like it's going to suck in my front yard too in winter for my fruit trees.  But I figured my stress can only do so much so I'm only a bit worried as the leaves on my fig tree have already dropped at that point and won't be doing much anyway... right?  *sticking my head in the sand like an ostrich!*  


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