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"Full sun" is the most confidently repeated bad advice in gardening. Tell us where you are and what's around the spot, and we'll compute the actual hours of direct sun it gets — every month of the year.
Only your latitude matters here, so a nearby city is exactly as accurate as GPS.
Stand where the plant will go. Tap each direction to say what blocks the sky — tap again to raise it.
Peak season (May–Aug)
13.5h / day
Enough sun to bloom
Plumeria need roughly 6 or more hours of direct sun to set flowers. Below that they'll usually still grow — they just stay leafy and stubborn about blooming.
Geometric direct sun — the hours the sun is above your horizon and clear of the obstructions you set. Cloud cover will trim this in practice, and a bright, fully open shade spot still isn't direct sun.
Quick answer
Sun Check computes how many hours of direct sunlight a specific spot receives each month, using your latitude and the height of whatever blocks the sky around it. Plumeria need about 6+ hours of direct sun to bloom reliably; fewer hours usually means a healthy plant that refuses to flower.
In Orlando the midday sun sits about 85° above the horizon in June — almost straight overhead. A six-foot fence casts a shadow barely longer than itself, so it blocks almost nothing. By the December solstice that same sun peaks at about 38°, low and to the south, and it spends the entire day behind anything tall on that side.
This is why "it gets full sun" is worth so little as a description. The spot that bakes in July can be in shadow from October to March, and the plant that thrived all summer suddenly sulks. Running the numbers for both ends of the year is the only way to see it coming.
It's geometry, not a light meter. It doesn't know your local cloud cover, it treats each direction as one flat obstruction rather than a real skyline, and it can't see a tree that's bare in April and dense in July. Indoors it's rougher still — glass cuts light further, and a window is a narrow aperture on an already-low winter sun. Most indoor spots simply cannot deliver bloom-grade light, and it's kinder to say so than to let someone wait a year to find out.
Treat the output as a well-founded estimate that's right about the shape of your year, and use it to compare candidate spots against each other — which is the decision you're actually trying to make.
Keep this sun profile
Attach it to a plant and Lani will use it whenever you ask about that spot — so "why won't it bloom?" can be answered with your actual light, not a guess.
Save my sun profileNot sure what your numbers mean?
Tell Lani what Sun Check gave you and she'll tell you what will actually thrive there — and what to do differently if the spot is marginal.
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