Two racking systems, three foundations and one panel. The choice between them is made by your fence line and your dirt, not by a catalogue.
Our default is IronRidge: panels in landscape, four high, at a thirty degree tilt.
Four high is the reason. It puts the most panels on the fewest foundations, which is where the money is on a ground mount — the steel and the holes cost more than the aluminium — and thirty degrees is close to optimal at this latitude, so it is also the arrangement that makes the most power per foundation.
The trade is height. Four panels stacked at thirty degrees stands well over eight feet at the back, which matters the moment a fence line or a city height rule is involved.
There is a second frame we have built and will build again: Unirac's two-high portrait frame. It exists, some homeowners feel strongly about it, and if you do, we will put it up.
It is not our recommendation. Two-high means more foundations for the same number of panels, and a shorter row gives up a little production. IronRidge four-high at thirty degrees is the frame on every job unless you ask for the other one.
It is also not the answer to a fence. A fence-height limit is solved on the IronRidge frame by bringing the tilt down — about fourteen degrees puts four modules under six feet. The frame stays. The angle changes. Ground mount solar, answered
Three types, and the soil survey decides rather than we do.
Driven steel piles are the fast case in stable ground: no spoil, no cure time, and the driving resistance tells you something about what is down there as you go.
Helical piles reach deeper stable strata and leave a torque record of what they hit on the way down. They are the answer where the active seasonal zone is deep or access is restricted.
Concrete piers get used where the soil is difficult, where uplift and lateral loads want the extra resistance, or where drilling is simply the only thing that will work.
The controlling question is the same in all three cases: does the foundation transfer load below the zone that moves with the seasons?
Blackland clay swells when wet and shrinks when dry. Rock near the surface stops a driven pile early. Loose sand gives a pile less lateral grip than stiff clay does.
We pull the soil map for your parcel before quoting a foundation, and a geotechnical report governs where one exists.
Dallas and Fort Worth sit in a 115 mph design wind zone under ASCE 7 — a three-second gust, Risk Category II, at the 700-year recurrence the standard uses as its default.
That number is the input, not the answer. What the structure and the foundation actually get designed to are the support reactions it produces: uplift and overturning, which depend on exposure, topography, height, tilt and row spacing.
And the final design queries your own coordinates rather than a city-name lookup.
So when somebody quotes you a wind rating for a racking system, ask what exposure category and what tilt it assumes.
Mission Solar 435 W as standard, carrying a twenty-five year product and performance warranty from the manufacturer. Premium panels are available on request.
SolarEdge inverters and optimizers, sized to the array, with the manufacturer's warranty.
Two warranties from two different people, and it is worth knowing which is which: the manufacturer covers the panels and the inverter, and we cover the workmanship for twenty years.
A manufacturer's warranty does not cover the person who installed it. How to pick a ground mount installer
Ballasted racking — the concrete-block system that sits on the ground without penetrating it. It is a commercial flat-roof and landfill answer. On residential acreage it needs a lot of concrete and a very flat pad to do what a driven pile does with a hole.
Trackers. A single-axis tracker makes more power per panel and adds motors, controllers and a maintenance schedule to something that otherwise has none. On a residential array in Texas the extra production has not, in our view, been worth the moving parts.
Pole mounts. One thick post, panels on top, a favourite of DIY installs. It is fine at small scale and it becomes an expensive way to buy foundations as soon as the array is house-sized.
None of those are bad engineering. They are answers to problems a North Texas house with an acre does not have.
For a residential array, the honest answer is the one that suits your constraints rather than a brand.
IronRidge is our standard: landscape, four panels high, at a thirty degree tilt.
It is fast to build and it puts the panels at close to the right angle for this latitude.
Where a fence line or a city height rule governs, what changes is the tilt rather than the frame — about fourteen degrees brings four modules under a six-foot fence, at the cost of a little production.
The fence decides, not the badge.
The soil survey for your parcel decides, and we pull it before quoting rather than after.
Stable ground takes a driven pile.
Deeper seasonal movement or restricted access points to a helical.
Difficult soil or high uplift points to a concrete pier.
What all three have to do is transfer load below the zone that moves through the seasons, which in Blackland clay is the whole design problem.
It is engineered to the ASCE 7 design wind speed for your site, which is 115 mph as a three-second gust across the Dallas–Fort Worth area, and the foundation is designed to the uplift and overturning that produces rather than to the wind speed alone.
Exposure, tilt and row spacing all move those reactions, so the design is run against your coordinates rather than a city-name lookup.
Yes, and that is one of the real advantages of a ground mount over a roof — a roof has an edge and a yard does not.
What determines the cost of adding is whether the original electrical run and the inverter were sized with room in them, so if a shop or an EV is on your horizon, say so before we design rather than after.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
