The ZIPs around Southlake hold about 2,200 single-family lots of an acre or more — the smallest inventory of the cities we serve, on the most expensive land in any of them.
Southlake also regulates a ground mount more closely than anywhere else on this list, which is worth knowing before you fall in love with a spot.
First question: who sends your electric bill?
Southlake is mostly deregulated, on Oncor's lines, with cooperative territory on its edges.
The difference decides whether your buyback is something you shop for or something you are handed.
Oncor owns the wires and delivers the power; it does not buy any of it back — your retail provider does.
The plan you signed sets the buyback, and you can change plans when the contract ends, so it is the one arrangement here that is not fixed for the life of the array.
Tri-County pays avoided cost, set month to month, and publishes the history so you can see what it has actually been.
Unused credits are reconciled once a year and paid by cheque.
There is a monthly minimum you pay whether you export or not and credits cannot offset it, plus an application fee per meter.
Avoided cost sits well under the retail rate, so on co-op lines the array wants sizing against your own use rather than against your roof-less acre.
Every North Texas provider's terms are on one page: what each utility pays for exported solar
Southlake's solar checklist has a Ground Mount option and it comes with conditions: an engineered footing detail and an inspection of it, engineered structural plans for the array, and a line diagram sealed by a Texas engineer.
Two more items catch people out.
The city asks you to show that the frame, support brackets and any visible wiring are a silver, bronze or black tone.
And where the array sits in a fenced yard or patio, the city asks you to show and verify the height, which cannot exceed the height of the fence — the state's HOA rule, checked by the city.
The zoning ordinance's solar section adds a ten-foot setback from any side or rear property line, keeps the array behind the principal building, and calls for a line-of-sight analysis.
Almost all of Southlake is inside the city limits, so the county question rarely arises.
Where it does, Tarrant County states that it does not issue building permits or certificates of occupancy for residential homes — but it requires a separate fire-code construction permit for building started since August 2018 and reviews floodplain and stormwater on sites over an acre.
This is a city where the design is settled on paper before anything is dug.
That suits us: the fence height, the setback and the sight lines are all decisions, and decisions are cheaper than revisions.
Southlake is sandy ground, not the clay people assume.
Of 104 land points we pulled from the USDA soil survey within six miles, 82 percent came back sandy topsoil, mostly Gasil and Crosstell fine sandy loams.
Two sides break the pattern.
North of town, nearly half the points reach bedrock inside three feet.
East of town, four in ten are dark clay.
Sandy is not automatically the easy answer.
Loose sand gives a driven pile less lateral grip than stiff clay does and it caves an open trench, so it changes the foundation and the trenching method rather than simplifying them.
Rock to the north stops a pile early; clay to the east swells and shrinks.
We pull the soil map for your parcel before quoting a foundation, and in Southlake that is not a formality.
A south-facing array at the thirty degree tilt we build makes about 1,578 kWh a year for every kW installed at the middle of Southlake.
On a 10 kW system that is roughly 15,800 kWh a year.
Take that figure with more salt here than elsewhere.
Our four points across the city ranged from about 1,519 to 1,578 — a four percent spread inside twenty square miles, which is the widest we have measured anywhere.
So the address matters, not the city name.
The design tool runs your own coordinates 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
Assume an association applies, and assume it has opinions.
What is unusual in Southlake is that the city already enforces the same fence-height test the state gives an HOA, and asks for the array's colour scheme and sight lines on top — so the city's requirements and the association's tend to point the same way rather than fighting each other.
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 goes up in the tones the city asks for.
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
Yes, and its own checklist has a Ground Mount option — but with conditions.
An engineered footing detail and an inspection of it, engineered structural plans, and under the zoning ordinance's solar section a ten-foot setback from any side or rear property line, nothing forward of the principal building, and a line-of-sight analysis.
It is the closest scrutiny of any city on our list.
Because its checklist asks you to show that the frame, support brackets and any visible wiring are a silver, bronze or black tone.
That mirrors the language in the state's HOA statute, and Southlake applies it at the permit desk.
It is not a problem — those are the finishes racking comes in — but it is a box that has to be ticked with the submittal rather than after it.
It is, and in Southlake the city checks it too: the checklist asks you to show and verify that a ground-mounted system in a fenced yard does not exceed the height of the fence.
So the fence height is the array height and it is settled before we draw anything.
A shallower tilt on the same frame is how it fits.
Probably not, and that surprises people.
Of the soil survey points around Southlake, 82 percent came back sandy and only about one in eight dark clay, most of that east of town — this is Cross Timbers ground, not Blackland.
Sandy is not the cheap answer either: loose sand gives a pile less grip and caves an open trench.
We map your parcel before quoting a foundation.
The towns nearest yours with a page of their own.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
