Fort Worth is a big city with a small amount of the land we need: about 3,600 single-family lots of an acre or more across its ZIPs, and most of them out west and south rather than spread across town.
If you are on one of them, the array is straightforward.
If you are on a quarter acre in the middle, we will tell you so.
First question: who sends your electric bill?
Almost all of Fort Worth is deregulated and on Oncor's lines, which means you chose the company that bills you.
The western edge is where that stops being true.
Oncor owns the wires and delivers the power; it does not buy any of it back — your retail provider does.
Your plan sets the buyback and you can change plans when the contract ends, so the number is not fixed for the twenty-five years the array will run.
Which means the sizing question in Fort Worth is not really about the utility.
It is about how much of your own consumption the array covers and how far it sits from the meter.
Push far enough west and you leave the deregulated market.
Tri-County pays avoided cost, set month to month, with a monthly minimum that credits cannot offset and an application fee per meter.
Unused credits are reconciled annually and paid by cheque.
Avoided cost sits well under retail, so out there the array is sized against your own use rather than against your acreage.
Every North Texas provider's terms are on one page: what each utility pays for exported solar
Fort Worth treats a solar array as an accessory structure, and says so: all accessory structures require a building permit, and the city lists solar panels alongside gazebos, wind turbines and swimming pools.
That framing matters more than it sounds, because accessory structures carry zoning requirements on location, maximum height and square footage that change with the size of your lot — the supplemental use standards in the zoning ordinance, not the electrical code, are what decide where a ground mount may stand.
Permits are filed online and the applicant has to be a registered building contractor.
Outside the city limits, Tarrant County states that it does not issue building permits or certificates of occupancy for residential homes and that its unincorporated areas carry no zoning restrictions.
It is not nothing, though: a separate fire-code construction permit applies to building started since August 2018, and the county reviews floodplain and stormwater on sites over an acre — which is every property this page is written for.
So the two questions we settle first in Fort Worth are your lot size, because it sets the accessory-structure rules, and your meter, because it sets the trench.
Fort Worth is too big to have one answer, and our sample proved it.
Four points, one to each side of the city, returned bedrock in the west, clay in the north, silty clay in the south and — east of downtown — a map unit the survey calls urban land, which is what SSURGO says when the original soil profile has been built over, cut or filled.
West is the expensive one.
Rock near the surface stops a driven pile early, so the foundation changes and the trench slows down, and both of those are real numbers on a quote rather than surprises later.
North and south is Blackland clay behaving normally: swells wet, shrinks dry, wants a foundation reaching below the zone that moves.
Urban land is the one to be careful with, because it means the ground has been worked and the survey cannot tell you what is under it.
On a made-ground lot the soil map is a starting point and not an answer, and a foundation there gets designed conservatively.
A south-facing array at the thirty degree tilt we build makes about 1,570 kWh a year for every kW installed in Fort Worth.
On a 10 kW system that is roughly 15,700 kWh a year.
Unusually, that figure holds across the whole city: our four quadrant points landed within half a percent of each other, so unlike the soil, the sunshine does not care which side of town you are on.
Yours will still differ by orientation and shading, and 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.
Fort Worth splits about sixty-forty towards older housing, so an association is likelier in the newer west-side and far-north developments than in the established neighbourhoods.
The city's accessory-structure rules apply either way, and on a small lot those bite before any HOA does.
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.
That also helps with the city's height limit for accessory structures.
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
Often not, and we would rather say so now.
Fort Worth permits an array as an accessory structure, which brings zoning limits on location, height and square footage that scale with lot size — and on a small city lot those limits, plus the setbacks and the shade from neighbouring houses, usually leave nowhere sensible to put it.
On an acre out west it is a different conversation entirely.
Because that is how the city classifies it.
Its own residential permitting page lists solar panels among the accessory structures that require a building permit, alongside gazebos and wind turbines, and points to the supplemental use standards in the zoning ordinance for location, maximum height and square footage.
So the zoning question comes before the wiring question.
More than anywhere else we work.
Our four samples returned bedrock in the west, clay north, silty clay south, and urban land east of downtown — that last one meaning the ground has been cut, filled or built over and the survey cannot say what is beneath.
Same city, four different foundations.
Inside the city, almost certainly a retail plan on Oncor's lines, which means you chose your buyback and can change it.
Push west past the city limits and you can be on Tri-County, where the co-op sets an avoided-cost rate you cannot shop for.
Your bill names the company, and we check it before sizing anything.
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.
