Where are you building, and in what climate?
This application applies no limit from a regulation. It works from the position of the building and from the climate that position sits in, classified by Köppen–Geiger, because that is the classification the design literature is written against — and, in Portugal, placed in the winter and summer climate zones of the SCE, the regulation’s own reading of the territory. Name the place, give its coordinates and altitude, then enter the monthly normals of the nearest station. What follows is orientation, compactness, roof, glazing, shading, the organisation of the plan and the movement of air — the decisions taken before any limit can be applied to them.
Choose the site position
Drag to explore, click to place the site — the coordinates follow and the altitude reads itself. Then use this position to return.
Monthly normals
Köppen–Geiger is computed, not looked up, so it needs the twelve monthly mean temperatures and the twelve monthly precipitation totals. This application ships none: normals are measured data and it has no authority to invent them. Take them from the IPMA normais climatológicas for the nearest station, from another national service, or from a gridded product such as WorldClim, and name the source so the export carries it. The boxes fill themselves in this order: the embedded IPMA station within 5 km of the coordinates above; where there is none, a blend of the nearest stations, weighted by inverse distance; and, on request, web normals — reanalysis for these exact coordinates. Blend nearest and Fetch web normals open only where no station lies within 5 km. Change the coordinates and the choice is made again; type in the boxes and they stay yours.
The climate they make
The same twelve months, larger: bars read precipitation on the left scale, the line reads mean temperature on the right. It follows the boxes — type there and this follows.
Grounded in the design literature
Olgyay, Lechner, DeKay and Brown, Hyde, Ching and Shapiro, Brophy and Lewis. Every guideline names the book it comes from, and where the books disagree the application says so rather than averaging them into a single number.
The decisions that come before the limits
Which way the building faces, how compact it is, what its roof does, how much glass each façade carries, where the rooms sit against the sun, and how air moves through the plan. None of these is settled by a maximum thermal transmittance.
A companion, not a replacement
Construction Advisor answers to the SCE and reports what an envelope may not exceed. This one carries only the SCE’s climate zones, as a reading of the territory, and none of its limits. Use them in that order: shape the building here, then take it there to be checked.
Nothing is uploaded; your work stays in this browser. What leaves it, only to fill something in: the coordinates, to two elevation services when you press Look up and to Open-Meteo when you press Fetch web normals; the map area, to Esri and OpenStreetMap for the tiles; the plot’s position, to OpenStreetMap’s Overpass servers for the neighbouring buildings and, once you move the plot, to Open-Meteo for the ground’s height and to Nominatim for its municipality; an address you search for, to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim.