Grand Prairie is a long strip of a city that runs across three counties, and the land we need is almost all at the southern end of it.
The ZIPs around the city hold about 5,700 single-family lots of an acre or more, and those ZIPs are shared with several neighbours, so treat that as the neighbourhood rather than the city limits.
First question: who sends your electric bill?
Grand Prairie is deregulated territory on Oncor's lines, so the company that bills you is one you chose — and the buyback is a term in that contract rather than a policy you are handed.
Oncor owns the wires and delivers the power; it does not buy any of it back — your retail provider does.
Your plan sets the buyback and you can change plans when the contract ends, which makes it the one number on this page you can renegotiate.
So sizing here is a question about your own consumption and your trench length rather than about a cooperative's export rate.
Read what your current plan pays for exported energy before you settle on a system size; the spread between plans is wider than most people expect.
Every North Texas provider's terms are on one page: what each utility pays for exported solar
Grand Prairie requires an approved permit from the Building Inspections Division for any residential solar installation, and it wants an architectural and structural plan with load calculations plus the mechanical, electrical and plumbing drawings.
The city publishes a fee estimator rather than a flat solar fee, so the number comes from your project rather than from a table.
It also allows third-party review and inspection, which is worth using when the queue is long.
Plans are reviewed against the 2021 International Residential Code and the city's own development code.
Grand Prairie sits in three counties and they do not answer the same way.
Tarrant County states it issues no residential building permits and has no zoning in its unincorporated areas, while still requiring a fire-code construction permit for building started since August 2018 and reviewing floodplain and stormwater over an acre.
Dallas and Ellis publish no residential building-permit programme, and the statute says counties generally have no such authority.
Almost every acre-plus property here is inside a city, so the city permit is the one that matters.
We pull it and we file the load calculations with it.
Grand Prairie is clay in the south and mixed in the north.
South of the middle of the city, 90 percent of the survey points are dark clay; north of it, 42 percent are sandy and only 39 percent clay.
That is from 108 points of the USDA soil survey on land within six miles.
Across all of them it is two-thirds dark clay and 18 percent sandy.
Shallow rock is rare, about one point in sixteen, and most of that is on the east side.
Clay and sand want different things.
Clay swells wet and shrinks dry, so the foundation reaches below the zone that moves and the trench is backfilled so it does not become a water path along the conduit.
Sandy ground digs easier but grips a pile less and can cave an open trench.
The city's acreage is mostly at the southern end, which is the clay side of our sample, so there we can often tell you the foundation before we pull the map for your parcel.
North of the middle, we look first.
A south-facing array at the thirty degree tilt we build makes about 1,531 kWh a year for every kW installed here.
On a 10 kW system that is roughly 15,300 kWh a year.
Points down the length of the city ranged from about 1,510 to 1,531, which is a smaller spread than the drive between them would suggest.
Yours will differ by orientation and by whatever is shading it — the design tool runs your own coordinates rather than a city average.
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
Grand Prairie is older housing stock than most of this list — under four in ten homes in these ZIPs date from 2000 or later — so an association is a real possibility rather than a near certainty, and the southern acreage is often outside one entirely.
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.
It costs a little production and it is not a dead end.
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
An approved permit from the Building Inspections Division, and with it an architectural and structural plan with load calculations plus the mechanical, electrical and plumbing drawings.
There is no flat solar fee — the city runs a fee estimator off the project — and third-party review and inspection is available if you would rather not wait on the city queue.
Grand Prairie runs through Dallas, Tarrant and Ellis, and they differ.
In practice almost every acre-plus property here is inside the city limits, so the city permit is the one that decides your job.
Where a property is genuinely unincorporated, Tarrant's fire-code construction permit and floodplain review can still apply and we get that answered in writing.
Effectively, yes.
The northern half of the city is built out at suburban density and a ground mount needs room that most of those lots do not have.
The acre-plus properties are south, towards the Ellis County line, and that is where nearly all of our Grand Prairie work is.
Probably, if you are toward the south end: 90 percent of the survey points south of the middle of the city are dark clay.
The north side is different, with 42 percent sandy.
The clay swells wet and shrinks dry, so the foundation reaches below the zone that moves — routine work, priced as routine work.
The towns nearest yours with a page of their own.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
