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Show HN: Helios – what plug-in solar could generate for any address in Britain (helios.southlondonscientific.com)
ltrg 1 hours ago [-]
Really cool stuff. Nitpick: it failed to grab an OSM ID for my house and fell back to postcode centroid, but then still reported LIDAR-derived shading at quite high precision.

I'm wondering if it should fall back to a more general shading approach when no OSM building footprint is available, to avoid false precision? My street has a gap in the houses on the other side from mine, so picking the right location matters for the calculation.

You could also try Inspire Index polygons instead of OSM? These correspond to actual lease/freehold boundaries.

ruaraidh 1 hours ago [-]
Thanks - I didn't know about Inspire Index, I'll check it out. I tend to agree about false precision. My first instinct was to use the synthetic horizon for addresses in that group, but I think that's over positive. A range might be better (if a bit more complex)?
realty_geek 18 minutes ago [-]
Nice. I'm working on a project called homestocompare to help people house-hunting in the UK.

Would be nice to add this as an extra data point when comparing. Are you open to collaborating at all?

ruaraidh 8 minutes ago [-]
Absolutely! I have some other datasets that might be useful too (e.g. air quality). Drop me a line: ruaraidh[at]southlondonscientific.com :)
redfloatplane 2 hours ago [-]
Huh, TIL about the National LIDAR Programme: https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/f0db0249-f17b-4036-9e65-3091...

Very interesting stuff and quite a large undertaking! I'm often impressed by the quality of the UK's open data.

kilroy123 2 hours ago [-]
I noticed this as well! Very interesting.
GordonS 2 hours ago [-]
This is really nice! Would be great if it could handle regular rooftop solar calculations too.
ruaraidh 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks! Should be doable, I just got excited by the new shiny thing first.
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