The ZIPs around Azle hold about 5,400 single-family lots of an acre or more.
An Azle address does not put you inside the city, though, and the city says so itself: which side of that line you are on decides who permits the array.
Azle is about thirty-five minutes from downtown Fort Worth.
First question: who sends your electric bill?
Around Azle it is either a retail provider on Oncor's lines or Tri-County Electric, the co-op with its head office in town.
One lets you shop for the buyback.
The other sets it for you.
Oncor owns the poles, wires and meter in the 76020 ZIP and delivers the power, but it does not buy any of it back.
Your retail provider does, on whatever plan you picked, and you can move to a different plan when the contract ends.
So on Oncor lines the buyback is a plan you choose, not a fixed rate.
Size the array to your own use first and treat the buyback as a bonus that can change.
Tri-County moved new solar members off net metering and onto avoided cost on March 1, 2024.
What you export is credited at an avoided-cost rate the co-op sets month to month and publishes.
Accounts are reconciled every March, and unused credit is paid by check.
Solar members pay a monthly minimum made up of a customer charge and a distributed generation charge, and credits cannot be used against it.
There is also an application fee for every meter the system connects to.
Exported power earns the avoided-cost rate, not the rate you pay to buy power, so on co-op lines the array is sized to what your house uses rather than to how much land you have.
Every North Texas provider's terms are on one page: what each utility pays for exported solar
Azle issues its own solar permit, and only for property inside the city limits.
The city is blunt about it: the city limits are not the Azle postal area and not the Azle school district, and if you do not pay city property tax, you are outside.
Inside, it asks for engineer-sealed structural and electrical plans, the panel specifications and layout, and the utility's interconnection approval, then inspects the electrical and the building at the end.
The solar page is written with roofs in mind.
The city's accessory-building rules keep a detached structure behind the house, at least ten feet from it and no taller than it; the city does not say whether a ground mount counts as one, so we ask before we draw.
Outside the city, it depends which side of the county line you are on.
Parker County issues no building permits at all.
Tarrant County issues none for homes either, but it does require a fire-code construction permit and reviews floodplain and stormwater on sites over an acre.
On both sides, your utility still has to approve the interconnection before anything is switched on.
Your tax bill settles which office you deal with, and we check it before anything else.
Azle sits right on the line between two kinds of ground.
North and west of town it is sandy Cross Timbers soil, loamy fine sand and fine sandy loam.
South and east it turns to dark clay loam, often gravelly, sitting on limestone that can be a foot down.
We pulled the soil survey at about a hundred points within six miles of town.
A little over half came back with sandy topsoil, about four in ten with dark clay topsoil, and about three in ten with bedrock inside three feet, most of those south and east.
Sand is the easy case.
A driven pile goes in clean and the trench digs fast, though loose sand wants shoring on a deep trench.
The dark clay over rock is the one that moves the price.
Rock a foot or two down stops a driven pile early, so the foundation changes and the trench slows down, and we would rather find that on the soil map than with the machine.
Which side of the line you are on is a question about your parcel, so we pull the soil map for it before we quote a foundation.
A south-facing array at the thirty-degree tilt we build makes about 1,572 kWh a year for every kW installed in Azle.
A 10 kW system comes to roughly 15,700 kWh a year.
Our five sample points around town landed within about two percent of each other, so the sun is not what separates one Azle property from another.
The utility and the ground are.
Yours will still differ with which way the array faces and what shades it, and the design tool runs your own coordinates rather than a town figure.
Texas law stops an HOA banning solar outright, but lets it keep a ground mount inside a fenced yard and no taller than the fence. What an HOA can and cannot do
About thirty percent of Azle's homes were built since 2000, older than most of the metro, so an association is less likely here than in the newer suburbs.
Inside the city limits, the accessory-building rules may matter before any HOA does.
Where a fence line does govern, we bring the tilt down on the same frame until the array fits under it — about fourteen degrees puts four modules below six feet.
No holes in your roof, panels aimed south instead of wherever the house faces, and room to add panels when the load grows. Ground mount vs rooftop
Not necessarily, and the city says so plainly: the city limits are not the Azle postal area and not the Azle school district.
If you do not pay city property tax, you are outside, and the city will not issue your permit.
Your Parker or Tarrant appraisal district record settles it, and we check it first.
Their avoided-cost rate, which the co-op sets month to month and publishes.
New solar members have been on that plan since March 2024; systems installed before then stay on the old one unless they are substantially changed.
There is also a monthly minimum you pay either way, and credits cannot cover it.
Inside the city, probably not.
Azle keeps accessory buildings behind the house and at least ten feet from it, and if the city treats the array as one, the same rule applies.
Outside the city limits that rule does not follow you, because the city only permits inside them.
It changes the price, not the answer.
About three in ten points we sampled around Azle have bedrock inside three feet, mostly south and east of town, and rock near the surface stops a driven pile early, so the foundation changes and the trench goes slower.
We see that on the soil map before we quote, so it is in the number from the start.
The towns nearest yours with a page of their own.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
