The ZIPs around Burleson hold about 7,300 single-family lots of an acre or more — more than anywhere we serve except Weatherford.
It is also twenty-five minutes from downtown Fort Worth, which makes it the rare place with both the land and the commute.
First question: who sends your electric bill?
Burleson straddles the deregulated market and cooperative territory, and the two work nothing alike.
On one you shop for the buyback; on the other it is set for you.
Oncor owns the wires and delivers the power; it does not buy any of it back.
Your retail provider does, on whatever terms that plan carries, and you can change providers when the contract ends.
United still nets.
If you use more than you make in a month, the kilowatt hours you sent back offset the ones you took at the retail rate — which is the most favourable arrangement of any cooperative in our footprint.
If you make more than you use, the surplus is bought at that month's wholesale power cost and banked as a dollar balance.
A net producer pays a $25 minimum bill plus securitisation charges on every delivered kilowatt hour.
Systems are capped at 50 kW DC.
So the sweet spot on United lines is an array that covers your use without routinely overshooting it, because the value drops the moment you tip from net consumer to net producer.
Every North Texas provider's terms are on one page: what each utility pays for exported solar
Burleson publishes a general building-permits page and nothing solar-specific that we can find — no checklist, no fee line, no ground-mount rule.
The array goes through the ordinary building and electrical process, and we confirm the requirements and the fee with the department before either lands on your quote.
Which county you are in changes the answer.
Tarrant County states plainly that it does not issue building permits or certificates of occupancy for residential homes and that there are no zoning restrictions in its unincorporated areas — but it also requires a separate fire-code construction permit for building started since August 2018, and it flags floodplain and stormwater review for sites over an acre, which is most of our customers.
Johnson County publishes no residential building-permit programme; the statute says counties generally have no such authority.
So on the Tarrant side we get the fire-code and floodplain questions answered in writing rather than assuming the county has nothing to say.
On the Johnson side there is usually less to ask.
Burleson is mostly clay, and then it is not.
Four points around the city returned clay in the middle and to the south, loam to the northeast and a map unit the survey simply calls variable to the northwest.
Clay here swells when it is wet and shrinks when it is not, so the foundation reaches below the zone that moves rather than sitting inside it.
That is standard work and it is priced as such.
The loam and the variable ground are the ones worth a look before quoting.
Looser soil gives a driven pile less grip and can cave an open trench, which is a different problem from rock and is solved differently.
Four points is a sample, not a survey.
On these lot sizes there is normally more than one workable spot, and the soil map is part of choosing between them.
A south-facing array at the thirty degree tilt we build makes about 1,569 kWh a year for every kW installed at Burleson's latitude, and the four points around the city agreed to within about one percent.
On a 10 kW system that is roughly 15,700 kWh a year — a better figure than anywhere on the eastern side of the metroplex, which is a matter of longitude and cloud cover rather than anything Burleson is doing.
Yours will differ by orientation and shading.
The design tool runs your own coordinates rather than a city figure.
If you are in an HOA, Texas law is on your side but only so far. The state stops an HOA banning solar outright.
It also lets an HOA prohibit a ground mount that sits anywhere other than a roof or a fenced yard.
Inside a fenced yard there is a second rule: the array cannot stand taller than the fence.
Burleson is mixed.
About half the houses in these ZIPs date from this century and sit in platted subdivisions with associations; the rest is older Johnson County acreage where nobody is going to ask.
Which one you are on is the first thing to check, because we have not found a Burleson ordinance capping ground-mount height.
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 the array goes where the sun is.
Nobody drills your roof, so there is nothing to re-flash when the roof gets replaced.
The panels point south at the angle we choose instead of wherever the builder pointed the house.
And a ground mount grows — a shop, a well pump, a second EV — where a roof has an edge. Ground mount vs rooftop
It matters.
Tarrant County does not issue residential building permits at all, but it does require a fire-code construction permit for building started since August 2018, and it reviews floodplain and stormwater on sites over an acre — which is most of the properties we work on.
Johnson County publishes no residential permit programme.
We get the Tarrant questions answered in writing rather than assuming.
Burleson has not published a solar fee that we can find, so we will not print one.
The array goes through the ordinary building and electrical process and we confirm the number with the department before it reaches your quote.
Up to a point.
United offsets what you send back against what you take at the retail rate, which is generous — but only while you stay a net consumer over the month.
Tip into being a net producer and the surplus is bought at wholesale and you pick up a $25 minimum bill.
So the array wants sizing to cover your use, not to beat it.
That is the question on Burleson lot sizes, and it is the one that moves the price.
The array itself is four hundred to six hundred square feet; the run back to your meter can be two hundred feet or more, and the trench is priced by the foot.
We measure it before we quote it.
The towns nearest yours with a page of their own. Each one has something local that changes the job.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
