First and foremost, it's essential to recognize two main streams of Feng Shui: Traditional, rooted in ancient Chinese wisdom, and New Age, a more recent trend borrowing from various traditions. Ba Zi Advisor follows the traditional approach, providing analyses and remedies firmly based on Traditional Feng Shui principles.

What are the reasons for conducting a Feng Shui audit of my home?

Feng Shui is widely discussed, and we've all heard about its beneficial effects for a harmonious and prosperous life. However, many misconceptions have arisen, including the belief in universally applicable remedies often associated with different colors, directions, and mystical figurines. This couldn't be further from the truth. Just as it's impossible to characterize a person solely based on their month or year of birth—requiring a comprehensive analysis of their birth year, month, day, and hour as conducted in Ba Zi Profiling—similarly, in the case of buildings, whether homes or workspaces, a personalized analysis is essential. This analysis begins with several defining elements of each house: its facing direction, the year of construction (or more precisely, the year it was first inhabited), and the direction of the main entrance.

Equally important is to carefully observe the surroundings of the building before undertaking specific measurements and calculations to identify the directions where beneficial or aggressive exterior forms, generators of Sha Qi, are located. The analysis of exterior forms is crucial yet complex and will be the subject of a subsequent article.

In conclusion, without a thorough building analysis, we cannot make any diagnosis, let alone apply remedies. In Ba Zi Advisor, our goal is to provide you with a quick and easy solution to conduct your own home or workplace audit with minimal Feng Shui knowledge. Based on this, we suggest some remedies. It's evident that the more you advance in understanding Traditional Feng Shui, the more techniques will be at your disposal to improve your life in all its aspects. Follow our courses in the form of articles on the application's blog to find answers to the questions you already have and those that will surely arise along the journey you've embarked on.

How do I conduct a Feng Shui audit?

Before we start, it's important to clear up some confusion.

When discussing individuals, we ascertain their Personal Directions through calculations based on their Ming Gua (or Kua number). This yields four favorable and four unfavorable directions for each person, which are independent of any building and applicable wherever the individual is engaged in activities.

Talking about buildings, either houses or business spaces, there are two main things to consider in our analysis.

Sectors: Each building is divided into eight sectors (Palaces) and a Central palace. Their favorability (also half/half) is determined by the house's magnetic orientation (Facing and Sitting). The analysis of the palaces and the application of corresponding remedies are part of the long-term resolution of a building's problems.
Flying Stars: Based on the year the house was built, we calculate its Kua number. Depending on this, we will determine the position of the Flying Stars in the Palaces, knowing that each Palace is associated with a Base Star, a Mountain Star, and a Water Star. The analysis of Flying Stars and their effects, along with the application of specific remedies, provide shorter-term solutions. These are influenced by the Day, Month, and Year Stars.

We represent the Palaces with their Flying Stars in Ba Zi Advisor using the Bagua representation.

The Feng Shui page of Ba Zi Advisor explains how the environment and the movement of energy - Qi - into a particular building can influence the personality and destiny of the people living or working there.

Enter someone's date of birth to:

discover their personal Kua number and trigram;
uncover their favorable and unfavorable directions, with four empowering and four challenging orientations
determine which group they belong to – Western or Eastern.

Pick a group of well-known individuals and explore your compatibility level with them.

individuals within the same group are mutually beneficial;
those from opposing groups may face challenges;

Enter a building's facade and main entrance direction, building year, and birthdates of residents to

unveil its favorable sectors;
discover how it influences its occupants;
what you could do to improve things; To analyze a building in detail, advanced analysis with some remedies included, a Golden subscription is required.

Conduct an exterior Form Analysis using a compass. It is strongly recommended that before the actual analysis of the building, you conduct an analysis of the exterior forms - the Forms activate the Stars - to determine both

the Missing sectors and
the sectors affected by Sha Qi. Then, mark the results and complete the corresponding table.

If you want to know more about the Eight Trigrams, Kua number, and Personal Directions read the article Quickstart Feng Shui: Mastering the Basics in No Time!.

Feng Shui Self-Audit: Step by Step

Conducting a Feng Shui self-audit with the help of Ba Zi Advisor is rather straightforward, following the few steps described below.

Before to begin

First and foremost, you'll need a building blueprint. If you don't have one, you'll need to take some measurements and draw it yourself, aiming for as much accuracy as possible. Print it on a sheet of paper and using a ruler and protractor, divide the building into 9 equal sectors, referred to as Palaces. You can photograph the house plan and use any Image Editor at your disposal to accomplish this. See the example below, a hand-drawn house plan, then photographed and divided into equal sectors using Microsoft Paint. Note the direction in each Palace and rotate the plan so that the South is at the top and the North is at the bottom (the traditional Chinese representation method). It's that simple!

Figure 2. Example of a Dui house, with the facade and main entrance facing East.

At this point, your plan will match the one in the application (see Figure 1. above), and you'll be ready to transpose the corresponding Flying Stars into each palace.

While rectangular or square buildings make this task easier, many homes don't have regular shapes, and you'll often encounter Missing Sectors. These have a significant impact on the building's occupants, especially when the missing sectors are in favorable areas, as you'll soon discover.

In the example shown above, it's easy to notice that this house is missing the SW sector. What does this mean for the residents, and upon which aspects will the consequences particularly impact? Ba Zi Advisor will provide the answers following the analysis.

For ease of identifying the favorable and unfavorable sectors for each resident on the house plan, as they will be presented below, we advise you to print the Luo Pan on the right of Figure 1 on a transparent sheet. Place it over the house plan, ensuring to align the center of the Luo Pan (marked with a dot) perfectly with the center of the house, which you will determine and mark on the plan.

Building Name

In the Building Manager configuration panel of Ba Zi Advisor, click on "New Building" and enter a desired name, for example, "home". You can analyze multiple buildings and spaces of interest, which will help you differentiate and review them later on.

For registered users with a Ba Zi Advisor subscription, even Free, the configured buildings and the users's contacts are saved in the application for their convenience.

Once you have chosen the building's name, it is automatically selected, and you can proceed to configure the following parameters that characterize the building from a Feng Shui perspective.

Determine the Facing Direction

Locate the Front of the Building: Stand at the building's front entrance or the area facing the main road, typically the busiest thoroughfare (assimilable to a Water Course).
Hold the Compass Level: Hold the compass level in your hand, ensuring it stays flat and steady. Stand with your back parallel to the building's façade.
Align the Compass: Hold the compass in front of you, ensuring the direction arrow points straight ahead.
Read the Compass: Check the compass to determine the indicated direction. The direction toward which the compass needle points indicates the building's facing direction.

Choose the Facing Direction within the 15-degree range that corresponds to your measurement.

Determine the building Year

Determine the year when the construction of the building was completed, and more importantly, when the building was finished and began to be inhabited or used if it's an industrial space.

Important! Building Year refers to the year when the first occupants moved into that dwelling for the first time. Since a building's Qi results from the composition of three distinct Qi elements, Heavenly Qi, Earthly Qi, and Human Qi, when a construction is completed, it essentially contains only Heavenly and Earthly Qi but lacks Human Qi. Because the building is intended for humans, the final Qi is practically obtained when the first person moves into that dwelling and resides there for a certain period.

Determine the Entrance Direction

Proceed similarly to when you determined the Facing Direction, but this time stand with your back parallel to the main entrance of the building. It's possible that this may not coincide with the Facing Direction.

Exterior Form Analysis

An analysis of exterior forms is necessary to accurately diagnose the building, upon which the application of an effective remedy relies. If you lack the experience and necessary knowledge, try at least to determine if there are any missing sectors or areas affected by Sha Qi. Once identified, check the corresponding boxes in the "Manage Buildings Panel."

Define the Residents' Group

To determine the favorable directions for each building resident, assess the extent to which the building favors them, identify the sectors they should avoid, and where they should ideally engage in various activities, create a group of residents, and input the birth date for each. If you also have the birth time, that would be even better. Press first "New Group" and name the group.

Add from your existing contact list those who are part of the group.

That's all Folks, let's now see the results!

Analyzing the Audit Results

Personal Feng Shui Panel

Sometimes, the Feng Shui of a person could be even stronger than the Feng Shui of his house.

A direction shall come to maximum effect after you spend some time doing what you do in that direction.

A direction is always dependent on the surrounding environment since it interacts with this.

Each of the 8 directions for an individual is presented, along with their effects and several tips related to each of them.

The most important directions for placing the Bed, Desk, or Stove are outlined, along with secondary directions in case it's not possible to use the recommended ones.

Building Analysis - Self-Audit

Discover explanations on how to determine the Eight Palaces and Flying Stars of a building in the article Quickstart Feng Shui: Building Analysis for Beginners - Part 1.

The Flying Stars in each Palace are analyzed, along with their effects in interaction with each other as well as with the Flying Stars of the Current Year and Month.

A more detailed analysis of the Flying Stars, along with the effects they manifest individually or in combination, can be found in the articles Quickstart Feng Shui: Building Analysis for Beginners - Part 2 and Quickstart Feng Shui: Building Analysis for Beginners - Part 3.

You can view the Ba Zhai analysis of each Palace, including the effects of Missing Sectors or those affected by Sha Qi, by pressing "see Ba Zhai details".

The favorable and unfavorable directions of each resident

The impacts of the building on the residents.

Each of the building's residents has some unfavorable personal sectors that clash with their Destiny Chart, which they need to know to avoid them, as well as corresponding sectors for their personal Stars, good or bad, calculated from the Destiny Chart, which is presented along with their effects.

Now that you've reached this stage, we're sure you have numerous questions, perhaps even more than before you started reading about Traditional Feng Shui. We've attempted to address some of them in the article Quickstart Feng Shui: Frequently Asked Questions - Part 1, and you can find an initial set of Tips & Tricks in the article Quickstart Feng Shui: Tips and Tricks.