How to find your main door's facing direction (HDB and condo)

Your main door's facing direction is the single number every fengshui reading of your home starts from. Get it wrong by a few degrees and you can end up reading the wrong chart entirely. Here is how to measure it properly with just your phone.

What "facing direction" actually means

The facing direction is the compass bearing your main door points toward when you stand inside your home looking out. It is measured in degrees: 0 is north, 90 is east, 180 is south, 270 is west.

In classical fengshui the compass is divided into 24 sectors called mountains, each exactly 15 degrees wide. Your facing degree lands in one of them, and that mountain - not just "south" or "north" - determines your home's flying-star chart. Two flats on the same corridor can face 168 and 175 degrees, both "roughly south", and have different charts.

Measure it with your phone in four steps

1. Open the compass app (iPhone: Compass. Android: usually built into Google Maps or a free compass app).
2. Stand just inside your main door, facing straight out, phone flat in your palm at chest height.
3. Step half a metre back from the door frame. HDB gate frames and metal doors pull the needle - if the reading jumps as you move the phone closer to the gate, trust the reading taken further away.
4. Note the degree, not just the letter. "S 178" is what you want, not just "S".

Cross-check: turn a full circle slowly and come back to the door. If the second reading is within a couple of degrees of the first, you are good. If your block has a lot of structural steel and the needle will not settle, use a paper map or satellite view: find your unit's door on the floor plan, orient the plan against the map, and read the bearing off that.

From degree to mountain: the 24 sectors

Each of the eight directions splits into three mountains. Each mountain spans 7.5 degrees either side of its centre line. Some examples of the exact boundaries:

So a door at 180 degrees sits in South 2 (Wu), but a door at 190 degrees is already in South 3 (Ding) - a different mountain, a different chart.

When the reading sits near a boundary

If your degree falls more than 3 degrees off a mountain's centre line, classical practice flags it as an off-centre facing (jian xiang 兼向). It still resolves to one mountain, but the reading deserves extra care. This is exactly why "my door faces south" is not enough information to chart a home.

Why this matters before you renovate

The facing degree fixes which rooms of your flat carry which stars for the whole of Period 9 (2024 to 2044). That decides which rooms to leave as they are and which are worth a fix - ideally before the carpenter quotes you, because a S$300 adjustment during renovation planning routinely replaces a S$3,000 rework after.

Luopan reads your exact degree against the full 24-mountain ring automatically: upload your floor plan, set the facing with your phone compass, and the first finding of your report is free.