The ZIPs around McKinney hold about 4,800 single-family lots of an acre or more, which is the third largest inventory in the region we serve.
McKinney also writes the clearest permit checklist of any city on this list, and it already knows what a ground mount is.
Look at who sends your electric bill before anything else.
Collin County is split between a deregulated market and two cooperatives, and the three of them pay very different things for the same exported kilowatt hour.
Your bill names which one you are on.
In the built-up city you choose the company that bills you.
Oncor delivers the power over its own wires and buys none of it back.
Your retail provider sets the buyback, and because you can change providers when the contract ends, that number is not fixed for the life of the array.
North and east of McKinney the co-op is the only company you can buy from, and the trade for that is kilowatt-hour netting at the full retail rate, which few Texas utilities still offer.
Each kilowatt hour you export cancels one you bought, and any left over carry into next month.
The catch is the rate class.
A solar member pays a $40 monthly base charge instead of the ordinary $25, and a one-time $40 application fee.
West of the city CoServ runs buy-all, sell-all: it buys every kilowatt hour the array makes and sells you every one you use.
What it pays is its avoided wholesale cost, 8.5 cents in September 2026, while you pay around twelve, and the credit can offset the $25 monthly minimum.
So on CoServ lines the array wants sizing to your own daytime use, and on GCEC lines it does not.
Same house, same panels, two different right answers.
Every North Texas provider's terms are on one page: what each utility pays for exported solar
McKinney's solar checklist has a mounting type for Ground Mount, which most cities' do not, and it asks for the right things: a site plan showing the ground-mounted equipment layout against your easements, property lines, building setback lines and zoning setbacks, and a structural engineer's sealed plans and calculations for the framing and foundations, with the connection details to the frame.
Plans are reviewed against the 2024 International Codes and the 2023 National Electrical Code.
Outside the city limits, Texas counties have no general authority to require a building permit for ordinary single-family construction, and Collin County publishes none that reaches a residential array.
Past the city line you still answer to septic setbacks, floodplain rules and the utility's interconnection approval; leaving the city drops one office, not every one.
Because the checklist is specific, a McKinney job goes in complete or it does not go in.
We submit the whole set at once.
McKinney is clay on three sides and rock on the fourth.
West of the city, 58 percent of the points we checked reach bedrock inside three feet.
North, east and south it is about one in ten.
The sample is 113 points of the USDA soil survey within six miles.
Eighty-nine percent came back dark clay topsoil, mostly Houston Black clay, with Austin and Lewisville silty clays behind it.
None was sandy.
Across most of the area it is a clay job: the piles go below the layer that heaves and settles with the seasons, and the trench is backfilled properly so it does not turn into a water path and sink.
West of town it is a rock job as well.
Shallow rock stops a driven pile early and slows the trench, which changes the foundation and the price, so out there we read the soil map for your parcel closely before quoting.
A south-facing array at the thirty degree tilt we build makes about 1,528 kWh a year for every kW installed at McKinney's latitude.
Ten kW of panels comes to roughly 15,300 kWh a year.
The four points around the city came back within about half a percent of each other, so that figure travels across McKinney better than it does across most cities.
What it is worth does not travel at all, because it depends which of the three utilities above sends your bill.
The design tool runs your coordinates; we check the meter.
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 seven in ten houses in these ZIPs were built in 2000 or later, so an association is more likely than not inside the city and much less likely on the older acreage outside it.
No McKinney ordinance we have found caps ground-mount height, so where there is an association, the association usually sets the limit.
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
Yes, and it is one of the few cities around here whose paperwork says so out loud — the checklist has a Ground Mount mounting type.
What it wants is a site plan showing the array against your easements, property lines and zoning setbacks, and sealed structural plans for the foundation.
That is a higher bar than some cities set and a much clearer one.
More than any panel or inverter choice on the quote.
A kilowatt hour you export is worth the full retail rate on Grayson-Collin, about 8.5 cents on CoServ where you buy at near twelve, and whatever your plan pays on Oncor's lines, where you can switch plans.
Your bill names the company and we confirm it before sizing anything.
On an acre, usually very little — the array is four hundred to six hundred square feet and the setbacks take a strip off the edges.
What actually decides the spot is the distance back to your meter, because the trench is priced by the foot.
We measure that run before we quote it.
Not for the building.
Texas counties have no general authority over ordinary single-family construction outside a city and Collin County publishes none that reaches an array.
Septic setbacks, floodplain rules and the utility's interconnection approval all still apply, so it is one office fewer rather than none.
The towns nearest yours with a page of their own.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
