Everything we get asked, in one place. If an answer here disagrees with a page on this site, the page is right and this is out of date — tell us and we will fix it.
Ours is $3.50 a watt, installed. That covers the panels, the rack, the foundation, the electrical work and the labour — so an 8 kW system is about $28,000 and a 15 kW system about $52,500.
It does not cover the trench from the array to your meter, or site work: rock adds ten percent, slope five or ten, clearing starts at $1,500. Those are the two lines that make two identical arrays cost different amounts, which is why we price them per property rather than averaging them into a headline number.
Because it is the largest swing on most quotes and it has nothing to do with the panels. The array has to reach your electrical panel, and that run is $35 a foot for the whole job — digging, conduit, wire and backfill, at the depth your permit office requires.
A ten kilowatt array 150 feet from the meter is $5,250 of trench. The same array 300 feet out by the barn is $10,500. That is $5,250 to move the panels 150 feet, and it is why we ask where your meter is before we ask anything about panels.
Cash or a loan. That is the whole list.
We do not sell leases and we do not sell power purchase agreements. You own the system, the production, and whatever your utility pays for the surplus. We are not a lender and we do not have a preferred one, so we publish no rates and no names — that part is between you and your bank.
On an acre with a clear south-facing spot and a short run to the meter, usually. On a small lot with a sound south-facing roof, no — put them on the roof and keep the money. We will tell you that on the phone.
The thing that moves the answer most is not the panels. It is what your utility pays for exported power: across the utilities we researched in September 2026 the best rate was 11.3 cents and the worst 5 cents. Same house, same panels, two different answers.
It is not a rule about ground mounts and it is not a cap on anything. It comes out of the residential building code: a rooftop array covering more than 33 percent of the roof's plan area needs a 36-inch clear setback either side of the ridge instead of 18 inches. It is a firefighter access threshold, on a roof.
Your ground mount is not on a roof, so it does not apply. Some installers use the same phrase for sizing an array above the inverter's AC rating, which is a different thing and not a code requirement at all.
Four hundred to six hundred square feet for a normal house. On an acre that is a corner of the lot.
Space is almost never the constraint on acreage. What decides the spot is how far it sits from your meter, because the trench between them is priced by the foot, and what is shading it at three in the afternoon in December rather than at noon in June.
Usually not, and we would rather say so now than after a survey. Under about an acre the setbacks, the shade from the house next door and the run back to the meter tend to leave nowhere sensible to put it.
That is not a hard rule — a long thin lot with a clear southern edge can work where a square one does not. Put the address into the design tool and it will tell you what fits before anybody visits.
Wherever the sun, the setbacks and the trench agree — and past that, it is your call. Back corner, behind the barn, out of sight of the house, or somewhere you can keep an eye on it.
That choice is the thing a roof does not offer. On a roof the panels go where the roof faces and you look at them from the street for the next twenty-five years. Some cities constrain it: Celina keeps a ground mount out of the front yard, Southlake wants ten feet from any side or rear line.
As far as you like, at $35 a foot. There is no technical wall at a normal residential distance; there is a price that keeps climbing.
Two hundred feet is a common run on acreage and it is real money. Before you settle on a spot for the view, get the number for that spot and the number for the closer one, and then decide. We measure the run before we quote it rather than after.
Inside a city, nearly always: a building permit and an electrical permit, and some cities add a plan review. There is no statewide solar permit and no standard fee — each city sets its own. Fairview publishes $175, Flower Mound $200, Celina $225 in three parts; several publish nothing at all and you find out when you apply.
Outside the city limits it is usually a shorter list, but that is not the same as no rules.
Usually not a building permit. Texas counties generally have no authority over ordinary single-family construction outside a city — Parker County says outright that it issues none.
But it varies more than people expect. Rockwall County runs a real permitting programme and requires contractors to register with it. Tarrant County issues no residential building permits while still requiring a fire-code construction permit for work started since August 2018, and reviewing floodplain and stormwater on sites over an acre. We ask per property rather than assuming.
If you are in an HOA, Texas law is on your side but only so far. The state stops an HOA banning solar outright. It also lets an HOA prohibit a ground mount that sits anywhere other than a roof or a fenced yard. Inside a fenced yard there is a second rule: the array cannot stand taller than the fence.
Where a fence line does govern, the fix is a shallower tilt rather than a different product: about fourteen degrees brings four modules under a six-foot fence. Check the dedicatory instrument early — it is cheaper than redesigning.
It depends on the city, and most of ours have not published one. Where a limit exists it is usually the accessory-structure height for your zoning district rather than a solar-specific number — Fort Worth permits an array as an accessory structure, so lot size sets the rules.
Nearby cities that do publish one land between eight and twelve feet, which our standard four-high configuration at thirty degrees would exceed — it stands near nine feet ten. That is the first thing we check, because it decides the tilt angle we design to, not the number of modules.
We do, and we tell you what each office said.
That includes the city building and electrical permits, the county where a county wants something, and your utility's interconnection application — which is separate from all of it and is what actually lets you switch the system on. You do not chase any of those offices. If a city or a co-op says something surprising about your address, you will hear it from us rather than discover it later.
Whoever sends your bill, and it is the single biggest variable on this page. In deregulated territory — most of Oncor's area — your retail provider sets the buyback and Oncor buys nothing at all; it only delivers. On a cooperative you cannot shop, and the co-op's policy is the policy.
That is why the first question we ask is who bills you. Every city page on this site opens with it, because the answer changes what size array is worth building before any equipment decision does.
Mostly not any more, and the exceptions matter. Grayson-Collin still nets kilowatt hour for kilowatt hour at the full retail rate, which is rare in Texas now, though going solar moves you to a rate with a $40 monthly base charge instead of $25. United nets while you stay a net consumer over the month.
Everyone else buys export at avoided cost: CoServ 8.5 cents in September 2026, Farmers EC around six, Denton Municipal five. Weatherford dropped net metering in 2020.
Sometimes, and Weatherford is the clearest case. Its city utility bills a capacity charge on the AC size of your system whether you export anything or not, so a bigger array costs more every month either way.
There the question stops being how big an array will fit and becomes how much of your own daytime use it covers. The opposite is true on Grayson-Collin, where retail netting means extra production keeps its full value. Same panels, opposite advice, decided by the meter.
On Oncor's lines, yes — that is the one number on your quote you can renegotiate later. Your buyback is a term in a retail contract, and when the contract ends you can shop it. Worth reading the export terms of the next plan before you sign it, because they vary more than the headline rate does.
On a cooperative you cannot switch. The co-op is the utility, and its distributed generation policy is what you get.
Mission Solar 435 W panels as standard, carrying a twenty-five year product and performance warranty from the manufacturer, and SolarEdge inverters and optimizers sized to the array. Premium panels are available on request.
Racking is IronRidge by default — landscape, four panels high, at a thirty degree tilt. Where a fence line or a height rule governs, the tilt comes down until the array fits under it: about fourteen degrees puts four modules below six feet, at the cost of a little production. That is a change to the drawing rather than a different frame.
One of three, and which one is a question about your dirt rather than our preference. Driven steel piles are the fast case in stable ground. Helical piles reach deeper stable strata and leave a torque record of what they hit. Concrete piers go in where the soil is difficult.
The controlling question is whether the foundation transfers load below the zone that moves with the seasons — Blackland clay swells wet and shrinks dry. We pull the soil survey for your parcel before quoting a foundation, not after.
For a residential array, the honest answer is the one that suits your constraints rather than a brand.
IronRidge is our standard: landscape, four panels high, at a thirty degree tilt. It is fast to build and it puts the panels at close to the right angle for this latitude. Where a fence line or a city height rule governs, what changes is the tilt rather than the frame — about fourteen degrees brings four modules under a six-foot fence, at the cost of a little production. The fence decides, not the badge.
Very little, and none of it on a schedule.
Rain does most of the cleaning. After a hailstorm, walk it and look — which you can do standing on the ground, unlike a roof array. Beyond that there is nothing you need to book.
We do not sell a maintenance plan. If something we built fails, the twenty-year workmanship warranty covers it, and the panels and inverter carry the manufacturer's own cover. A plan on top of that would be selling you something you already have.
A full install takes two days, three if we hit rock.
The whole job is longer than that, and most of it is waiting rather than working: a site survey, then permits and the utility's interconnection application, then the install, then switch-on once the inspections clear. The two days are the part with our trucks in your yard. The rest is paperwork we do while you get on with your life.
Two, from two different people, and it is worth knowing which is which.
The manufacturer's warranty covers the panels and the inverter — the panel we fit carries twenty-five years of product and performance cover. Ours covers the workmanship for twenty years.
A manufacturer's warranty does not cover the person who installed it, which is the question to ask any installer you are comparing us with.
It takes yard — four hundred to six hundred square feet for a normal house. It costs more up front than the same panels on a roof. It needs a trench from the array to your meter, priced by the foot.
An HOA can confine it to a fenced yard and cap it at the fence line, and some cities add their own height and setback rules. It sits at ground level, so livestock, mowers and anyone who wanders in can reach it. And you can see it — though unlike a roof, you choose from where.
Up front, yes: it buys a steel structure, a foundation and a trench, none of which exist on a roof job. The figure most often quoted, about 41% more, is a whole-system comparison inflated by ground-mount systems being larger; per watt the same source lands nearer 14%.
What you get back is the angle. Our own PVWatts runs put a south-facing array about 23% above an east-facing roof and 21% above a west-facing one — and close to nothing above a good south-facing roof, which is when we tell you to use the roof.
Probably not to make the arithmetic work. In our quotes most people do not. A battery is for keeping the lights on when the grid is down, and it earns very little where you can export instead — buy it for the outage, not for the payback.
If you want one, a Tesla Powerwall 3 is 13.5 kWh and we fit up to two. It is priced after the design, because adding one also adds a second run in the trench and that depends on where your array ends up.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
