The ZIPs around Flower Mound hold about 4,800 single-family lots of an acre or more, and the town sits about forty minutes from either downtown.
It is also the one town we serve whose permit packet already knows what a ground mount is.
First question: who sends your electric bill?
The Town names two electric companies and they are not interchangeable — CoServ on the co-op side, Oncor on the deregulated side.
One of them sets your buyback and the other does not buy anything at all.
CoServ has bought all of it and sold all of it back since February 2023.
Exported energy earns CoServ's avoided wholesale cost — 8.5 cents a kilowatt hour in September 2026 — which is well under the rate you pay to import it.
Credits are a dollar amount on the bill and unused ones carry forward.
There is a $25 monthly minimum, made up of a $10 customer charge and a $15 distributed generation charge, and the credit is allowed to offset it.
A system already on the old net metering arrangement is grandfathered, but a member who moves to buyback cannot move back.
On CoServ the question stops being how big an array will fit and becomes how much of your own use it covers, because a kilowatt hour that leaves the property is worth a fraction of one you keep.
Oncor owns the wires and delivers the power; it does not buy any of it back — your retail provider does.
Your provider sets the buyback and you can change providers when the contract ends, so the terms are worth checking before anyone sizes anything.
Every North Texas provider's terms are on one page: what each utility pays for exported solar
The Town's solar packet has a section for ground-mounted systems, separate from the roof-mounted one, and it asks for exactly the right things: a site plan showing setbacks to property lines and other structures, plans showing the height of the array, and structural plans sealed by an engineer licensed in Texas.
It also wants a letter from the master electrician registered with the Town confirming the house's smoke and carbon monoxide detectors meet the current code.
The permit is $200 and it is filed through the Town's online portal.
Outside the town limits, Texas counties have no general authority to require a building permit for ordinary single-family construction, and Denton County publishes none that reaches a residential array.
Septic setbacks, floodplain rules and your utility's interconnection approval still apply.
We pull whichever applies.
The detector letter surprises people; it is a five-minute job and we handle it with the rest of the packet.
Flower Mound is mostly sand, with clay on the east side and rock scattered through it.
Of 105 land points we pulled from the USDA soil survey within six miles, 69 percent came back sandy topsoil.
East of town, 54 percent are dark clay instead.
Rock is the other variable.
Just over a quarter of the points reach bedrock inside three feet, most often to the west, at 36 percent.
A common soil here, Birome fine sandy loam, sits on rock less than three feet down.
That is the Cross Timbers running into the Grand Prairie, which is the same boundary the town is named for: sandy ground weathered out of sandstone on one side, dark clay toward the east.
Each is a different job.
Loose sand gives a pile less grip and caves an open trench.
Rock stops a driven pile early and slows the trench.
Clay swells and shrinks and wants a foundation below the zone that moves.
A mile can change the answer here, so we pull the soil map for your address before quoting a foundation.
A south-facing array at the thirty degree tilt we build makes about 1,530 kWh a year for every kW installed here.
On a 10 kW system that is roughly 15,300 kWh a year.
Flower Mound is the one place where our own sample moved around: points a few miles apart came back between 1,526 and 1,567 kWh per kW.
That is a three percent spread on the same town, which is why we run coordinates rather than quoting a town figure.
The design tool does that with your address, and accounts for which way your land faces and what is shading it.
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
Flower Mound is older stock than the Collin County suburbs — under four in ten houses in these ZIPs date from 2000 or later — so an HOA is a real possibility rather than a near certainty.
We have not found a Town ordinance capping ground-mount height, which usually leaves the association as the binding constraint where there is one.
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.
The Town wants the array height on the plans either way, so that number gets settled early here.
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
A site plan with setbacks to your property lines and other structures, plans showing how tall the array will stand, structural plans sealed by a Texas-licensed engineer, and the electrical set.
Plus a letter from the master electrician registered with the Town about your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, which catches people out.
The permit is $200.
It matters more than the panels do.
On CoServ every exported kilowatt hour is bought at avoided cost, 8.5 cents in September 2026, so the array wants sizing to your own use.
On Oncor the buyback is a line in whichever retail plan you chose, and you can change plans.
Your bill says which one you are on, and we confirm it before quoting.
Because in Flower Mound it changes across town.
Most of it is sandy, but east of town more than half the survey points are dark clay, and about one in four anywhere has rock inside three feet.
Three different foundations and three different trench prices.
In most towns we can guess before we look.
Here we do not.
Four hundred to six hundred square feet for a normal house.
On an acre that is a corner of the lot.
The constraint on acreage is almost never space — it is how far the array sits from your meter, because the trench between them is priced by the foot.
The towns nearest yours with a page of their own.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
