Also known askampasmagnetic compass
On tilted plots, directions and zones must be read in degrees with a compass. Vedic vastu never says to treat any corner as Ishaan or to accept a direction however tilted it is, and a wrong reading leads to costly and harmful changes.
Compass
Buy a liquid-filled compass from a stationery shop or online; it makes it easy to set zero degree and read degrees. Also download Google Earth on a laptop or computer and install a compass app on the mobile, which works only on Android phones, not on iPhones. Geo Vastu does not sell a compass of its own.
By convention the whole world measures tilt from North, saying whether it turns toward East or West, and the compass itself points to North. You could count it from East if you prefer.
Because the degree must never be taken from the centre. A compass placed at the centre only shows roughly whether a room is in the North-East or North-West; the exact tilt comes only when the compass is parallel to a wall. In a regular house, readings taken parallel to the walls are the same everywhere.
Simply line it up. The dial has a North-South line and an East-West line; turn it until one of them lies exactly straight with the mirror line and the axis line. The more precisely it is straight, the more accurate the reading; a crooked setting can read 20 or 30 degrees for the same house.
Not necessarily. A magnetic compass shows North directly, so its reading can be stated straight away, for example North 30 degrees toward East. Google Earth and the mobile app only show the heading of the line you draw, and North has to be worked out from it; a heading of 2.39 means North lies 2.39 degrees to the left.
No. If it has a straight edge on its side, keep that edge parallel to a wall. A liquid compass that is set exactly gives the correct reading, and it may also show the water level.
Each small line is 2 degrees. If the needle falls three lines after North, the tilt is 6 degrees; five lines after North means 10 degrees.
In a regular plot you can set the zero directly at 350 degrees when drawing the straight line. It is easier to think of it as a 10-degree tilt and set off 10 degrees, because that method works from whichever side of the plot you start.
No. Each map has its own tilt, 10, 12, 20 or 25 degrees, and North can be on any side. Measure the tilt with Google Earth and find which side is North at the site, from the client or from the North mark that most plans carry, although the tilt itself is not written on them.
The method is the same. Take the degree of one wall on Google Earth, draw a line through the centre parallel to that wall, set off the tilt (for example 20 degrees towards West, that is 340 degrees) to get exact North, align N5 of the chakra with it and mark the zones. The centre of an irregular plot can be found only with AutoCAD or by cutting the paper plan to shape and finding its balancing centre.
Yes, always by degrees; reading directions without degrees was a mistake, and only the degree method shows the actual zones.
Degrees can still be taken: place the compass parallel to the axis, or draw the line with the Google Earth compass, and read the degree from it.