The ZIPs around Rockwall hold about 4,000 single-family lots of an acre or more, on the east shore of Lake Ray Hubbard.
Rockwall rewrote its solar rules in 2023, and the eight-foot cap people quote now applies to commercial buildings, not to a house.
Rockwall is about forty minutes from downtown Dallas.
Look at who bills you for power.
In Rockwall the usual answer is a retail provider on Oncor's lines.
On some of the land around town it is Farmers Electric Cooperative, and the two pay for exported power in very different ways.
Oncor carries the power and owns the meter in Rockwall, but it does not buy a kilowatt hour back.
That is your retail provider's call, and since you can change providers when a contract runs out, the buyback you start with is not locked in for the life of the array.
On Farmers EC lines, net metering is not offered to new systems.
Exports are bought at avoided cost, meaning the prior year's average wholesale power cost minus transmission and wires, around six cents a kilowatt hour by the co-op's own guidance.
That is roughly a third of what the same kilowatt hour is worth when you use it at home.
The co-op adds a monthly distributed generation charge to the member charge and bills an application and inspection fee before hookup.
So a Farmers EC array is sized to daytime use.
Extra panels on extra land mostly export at the low rate.
Every North Texas provider's terms are on one page: what each utility pays for exported solar
Rockwall rewrote its solar rules in March 2023.
For a house, the city's code asks for one thing: a building permit under the building code.
The eight-foot height cap, the rule that keeps the array behind the building and the solid screening fence all sit under the commercial heading of the same section.
The building department's sheet wants a site plan on a survey plat showing the array against the property lines, easements and house, and structural plans sealed by a Texas engineer for the new foundation.
It lists the fee at 65 cents a square foot.
Under the state's third-party review process the city issues the permit at no charge, or for a $75 minimum if the city does the final inspection.
On unincorporated land the permit is Rockwall County's.
Its checklist puts septic and driveway approvals ahead of the building permit, sends the plans to the fire marshal, and requires any contractor on the job to register with the county.
Inspections go to an outside inspection firm.
No cap for a house is not the same as no rules.
The array still has to meet the setbacks for an accessory structure on your lot, and we confirm those with the department before we quote.
Rockwall is clay on the lake side and clay inland.
Ninety-two percent of the land points we checked came back dark clay topsoil, and only one of them showed bedrock inside three feet, on the north side.
We set 113 points of the USDA soil survey within six miles of town, and 89 of them landed on mapped soil.
The south side is the least uniform, at 83 percent clay, and nothing anywhere came back sandy.
Heavy clay like this rises and falls with the rain.
A Rockwall foundation is built to reach below that movement rather than ride on it, and with almost no rock the trench is a straightforward dig.
We still check the soil map for your lot before we put a foundation on the quote.
A south-facing array at the thirty-degree tilt we build makes about 1,527 kWh a year for every kW installed in Rockwall.
A 10 kW system comes to roughly 15,300 kWh a year.
That is toward the low end of our city pages, and only by a couple of percent: latitude and the weather record, not anything about Rockwall.
Our five sample points around town landed within about two percent of each other.
Trees, a slope or an array turned off due south will move your number, which is why the design tool runs your own coordinates instead of this one.
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 six in ten houses in these ZIPs were built in 2000 or later, so on a lot inside a subdivision assume an association applies and read its dedicatory instrument early.
The city publishes no height cap for a ground mount at a house, 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.
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 at a house, since March 2023.
The city's code still has an eight-foot cap, the behind-the-building rule and the screening fence, but they sit under the commercial heading.
For a house it asks for a building permit under the building code, and the array still has to meet the setbacks for an accessory structure.
We confirm those with the department before we quote.
The building department's solar sheet lists 65 cents a square foot.
Under the state's third-party review process the city issues the permit at no charge, or for a $75 minimum if the city does the final inspection.
We confirm which route and what area the fee is measured on before it reaches your quote.
It can.
A shoreline lot brings a floodplain question, and floodplain is exactly the sort of thing that gets checked before a foundation goes in.
It also tends to mean the clear southern exposure is the side facing the water, which is a conversation about where the array sits and how far the trench runs.
Two drawings, mostly.
The building department's solar sheet asks for a site plan on a survey plat that shows the array against your property lines, easements and house, and structural plans for the new foundation sealed by a Texas engineer.
Plan on both before the permit application goes in.
The towns nearest yours with a page of their own.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
