The ZIPs around Waxahachie hold about 6,800 single-family lots of an acre or more, the second largest inventory anywhere we serve.
It is old Ellis County land, a lot of it never subdivided, and the ground under it changes more than the map suggests.
First question: who sends your electric bill?
Around Waxahachie that is normally a retail provider on Oncor's lines, which means the buyback is a line in a contract you chose rather than a policy set by a cooperative.
Get the bill out before you settle on a size.
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.
That is worth knowing before you size anything, because plans differ enough that the same array pays back at noticeably different speeds depending on which one you are on.
If your address turns out to be on a cooperative instead, the terms are set by the co-op and are not something you can shop for.
Every North Texas provider's terms are on one page: what each utility pays for exported solar
Waxahachie publishes no solar-specific permit document that we have been able to find — no checklist, no fee line, no ground-mount rule.
That does not mean no permit; it means the array goes through the city's ordinary building and electrical process, and the details come from the building department rather than from a web page.
We confirm the requirements and the fee with them before either appears on your quote.
Outside the city limits, Ellis County does not run a residential building-permit programme.
Texas counties have no general authority over ordinary single-family construction outside a city, and the county's own work is septic, floodplain and platting.
All three of those can still reach a ground mount, and so can your utility's interconnection approval.
We ask rather than assume, and we tell you what the answer was.
A city that has not published its rule is not a city without one.
Waxahachie is dark clay with rock under a lot of it, and the west side is the rockiest.
West of town, 88 percent of the points we checked reach bedrock inside three feet.
East of town, none do.
Across 108 points of the USDA soil survey on land within six miles, 91 percent is dark clay topsoil and 42 percent has bedrock inside three feet.
Houston Black clay covers about 45 percent; Austin silty clay, with rock about thirty inches down, another quarter.
Rock and clay are two different jobs.
Shallow rock stops a driven pile early and makes the trench slow going.
The clay swells when it is wet and shrinks when it is not, so the piles reach below that zone.
On a lot of the land around here you get both.
East of town it is a clay job; west of town it is a rock job.
The soil map for your parcel tells us which before we quote a foundation.
A south-facing array at the thirty degree tilt we build makes about 1,546 kWh a year for every kW installed at Waxahachie's latitude — the best figure of the cities we have measured, by a small margin, because it is the furthest south.
On a 10 kW system that is roughly 15,500 kWh a year.
Points around town ranged from about 1,498 to 1,546, so treat any single town figure as a starting point.
Yours will differ by orientation and by whatever is shading it.
The design tool runs your own coordinates rather than a county 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
Waxahachie is mixed in a way the new Collin County suburbs are not: about half the housing stock in these ZIPs predates 2000, and a good deal of the acreage outside town was never platted into a subdivision at all.
So an HOA is a real possibility inside the city and often no constraint at all outside it.
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.
On unrestricted acreage neither rule bites and the array goes where the sun is.
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
We do not publish a figure, because the city has not published one for solar that we can find.
Waxahachie has no solar checklist and no solar fee line, so the array goes through the ordinary building and electrical process and we confirm the number with the building department before it reaches your quote.
Guessing on an invoice is worse than asking.
Not a building permit.
Ellis County does not run a residential building-permit programme — Texas counties have no general authority over ordinary single-family construction outside a city.
What the county does regulate is septic, floodplain and platting, and any of those can still reach where an array sits.
Usually, and it costs more.
This is a live question in Waxahachie rather than a hypothetical one — 42 percent of the soil survey points around town have bedrock inside three feet, and west of town it is nearly nine in ten.
Rock near the surface stops a driven pile early, the foundation changes and the trench gets harder.
That is a line on the quote before we start.
A little, and less than people hope.
Waxahachie measured about 1,546 kWh a year per kW installed against roughly 1,528 up in McKinney — about one percent, which is real but is not the reason to build.
What moves your number far more is which way the land faces and what is shading it.
The towns nearest yours with a page of their own.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
