Design a sunnier house with Soleili
March 18th, 2009
There are lots of drawing tools out there. Whether it's a quickie sketch, or a huge mechanical drawing, there's sure to be an app that will help you take care of business.
Soleili is a drawing tool that can actually help you to be more environmentally conscious. On its face, it's an architectural drawing tool—use it to design your gazebo, shed, or house. Once you're done with that, the interesting part begins.
Enter geographical location information for your project, and the app will calculate how sunny your building will be. If you want to maximize the effect of solar heating, you can rotate your drawing, or add windows, etc. in order to take full advantage of the Sun as a free energy source. Conversely, if you're looking at desert construction, you can manipulate your drawing to minimize the effect of the sun.
Soleili is designed to be useable by almost anybody, from a backyard hobbyist driven to build a better doghouse, up through architects and engineers who want some serious help with making their projects more environmentally conscious.
Soleili is a free download. It's a Windows app and will run on any 32-bit Windows platform, from Win95 on up.
Cool. Looks like Google Sketchup has competition