Our price is $3.50 a watt, installed.
That covers the panels, the rack that holds them, the foundation it stands on, the electrical work and the labour to put it up — Mission Solar 435 W on IronRidge racking at a thirty degree tilt.
What it does not cover is the trench from the array to your meter, and site work: rock, slope, clearing. Those are priced separately, below.
The trench is the reason two identical arrays cost different amounts.
Same panels, same rack, same tilt, and one of them is two hundred feet further from the meter than the other.
Here is the installed number by system size, before trench and site work.
| System size | Installed |
|---|---|
| 8 kW | $28,000 |
| 10 kW | $35,000 |
| 12 kW | $42,000 |
| 15 kW | $52,500 |
Premium panels are available on request.
Sizes are nominal. A real array lands on a whole number of panels, so a build comes out a little either side of the row you are reading.
The panels carry a twenty-five year product and performance warranty from the manufacturer.
The design tool quotes a range, eight percent either side. Anything tighter would be pretending to a precision nobody has before somebody stands on the land.
Four things, and one of them is usually bigger than the other three.
The array has to reach your electrical panel, and that is a trench. Open, conduit, bedding, backfill: $45 a foot for the simplest run.
That covers a trench at the depth your permit office requires, the conduit the design calls for, and backfill.
A ten kilowatt array 150 feet from the meter is $6,750 of trench. The same array 300 feet out by the barn is $13,500.
That is $6,750 to move the panels 150 feet, and it is the single largest swing on most quotes.
Bigger systems need bigger conduit. Past 10 kW the rate goes up five percent, and past 20 kW it goes up twenty, because that is two conduits instead of one.
A battery adds a second run alongside and another five percent, whatever the size.
This is why we ask where your meter is before we ask anything about panels.
Rock near the surface stops a driven pile early and makes the trench slower. Rocky ground adds ten percent to the equipment and trench subtotal.
On a 10 kW system 150 feet out, that is $41,750 of equipment and trench, so rock adds about $4,175.
Gentle slope adds five percent. Real slope adds ten. On the same system that is roughly $2,090 or $4,175.
You tell us which one you have.
We used to price this off a terrain model sampled every 200 feet, and a person standing on their own land knows better than the model does.
If the spot has trees or heavy brush on it, clearing is $1,500 for mobilisation and the first quarter acre, then $2,500 an acre after that.
We clear fifteen feet of working room around the array, so the cleared area is bigger than the array.
Most acreage jobs need none of it. If yours is already mown, that line is zero.
Where you want the panels is a conversation about money as well as about the view.
It costs more. Here is the honest version of how much more, which is harder to give than you would think.
Nobody publishes a residential ground-mount benchmark.
NREL models residential solar as rooftop and only does ground mount for commercial and utility scale. SEIA does not publish one either.
What does exist is marketplace data, and the number people quote off it is wrong.
EnergySage's figure of about 41 percent more is a whole-system comparison, and ground-mount systems in that data are bigger — 14.7 kW against 12 kW.
Per watt, their own numbers are $2.96 against $2.60, which is 13.8 percent, not 41.
Our $3.50 is not directly comparable to either.
Theirs is a whole-system average with somebody's trenching already inside it; ours has the trench priced separately and printed on this page.
Compare them straight across and you will be wrong in one direction or the other.
Scales with system size. Nothing about your land changes it.
Comes off your property. Two identical arrays differ here.
A freestanding steel structure instead of rails bolted to your rafters. Foundations — driven piles or piers, which a roof does not need at all.
A trench and a run of underground conduit. More excavation and more labour hours.
That is the whole list.
An asphalt roof and the panels are on similar clocks, and the roof usually runs out first.
When it needs replacing, the panels come off first and go back on after — EnergySage puts that at $1,500 to $6,000, and over $7,000 on a bigger system, before the roof itself.
Then every mounting point gets drilled and flashed into your new roof. Ground mount vs rooftop
A ground mount is walked, inspected and serviced standing on the ground. Nothing about it is holding rain out of your house.
The federal credit expired on 31 December 2025. Nothing here assumes it, and there is no line in our pricing file that can turn it back on by accident.
A south-facing array at the tilt we build makes about 1,577 kWh a year for every kW installed.
That is a real run for Weatherford coordinates. Ten kilowatts there is roughly 15,800 kWh a year.
Yours will differ a little. Latitude moves it, which way your land faces moves it, and anything shading it moves it more than either.
We plan against fourteen cents a kilowatt hour, which is the Texas residential average and our own working assumption, not your rate.
Get your bill out and use the number on it — the two are rarely the same.
Every kilowatt hour you use yourself is worth whatever you would have paid for it.
Every one you export is worth whatever your utility pays, and that is where the arithmetic stops being general.
Across the DFW utilities we have researched as of September 2026, the best export rate we found was 11.3 cents and the worst 5 cents.
That is more than double, on every exported kilowatt hour.
Rates move and plans change, so check the current terms for your own utility before you size anything.
Your buyback plan moves your payback more than any equipment choice does. A different panel changes the equipment line once.
The buyback difference compounds every month you own the thing.
Some of it is not even the rate.
Weatherford's 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 use it covers.
Which is why the first thing we ask is who sends your electric bill. We cannot size the system without it.
Cash or a loan. Those are the two.
No leases and no power purchase agreements. You own the system, the production, and whatever your utility pays for the surplus.
We are not a lender and do not have a preferred one, so this page carries no rates and no names.
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.
In our quotes, most people do not need one to make the arithmetic work.
A battery is for keeping the lights on when the grid is down, and it earns very little in a place where you can export instead.
Buy it for the outage, not for the payback.
It is not a rule about ground mounts, and it is not a cap on anything.
It comes out of the residential building code, and it says that 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 also use the phrase for sizing an array above the inverter's AC rating, which is a different thing entirely and not a code requirement at all.
$3.50 a watt installed, plus $45 a foot of trench from the array to your meter, plus ten percent if the ground is rocky and five or ten if it slopes.
A 10 kW system 150 feet out on flat clear ground is about $41,750 before permits.
The table above has the other sizes.
Yes.
Per watt, the published marketplace numbers put ground mount about 14 percent above all solar, and no national body publishes a residential benchmark to check that against.
What you buy for it is a steel structure, a foundation and a trench — and no holes in your roof, no panels to remove when the roof gets replaced, and maintenance you can do standing on the ground.
On an acre with a clear south-facing spot and a short run to the meter, usually.
On a wooded lot 400 feet from the house with rock under it, the trench and the clearing can cost more than the panels, and it is a closer call.
Better to know that before a site visit, which is why the design tool prices the trench.
Ours is $3.50 a watt installed — panels, rack, foundation, electrical and labour — before trench and site work.
Ask what any other per-watt figure includes before you set it beside ours.
Most published averages are whole-system numbers with somebody's trenching already inside.
The house size does not price it.
What prices it is how many kilowatt hours you use, how far the array sits from your meter, and what is under the grass.
Two identical 2,000 square foot houses, one with a pool pump and a shop and one without, are not the same system.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
