The ZIP codes around Weatherford hold more acre-and-up home lots than anywhere else we serve.
Parker County is where the land is, and we are about forty minutes from Fort Worth.
First question: who sends your electric bill?
Inside city limits it is Weatherford Electric.
Outside, it is Tri-County Electric or a retail provider on Oncor's lines.
The answer changes how we size your system.
The city owns its electric utility, so you do not pick a retail provider.
It dropped net metering in 2020 and now credits exported energy at its Avoided Cost of Generation Rate — what the city pays for wholesale power, less ERCOT and transmission charges.
That is well under the retail rate you pay to import.
Customers on the residential distributed generation rate also pay a Distributed Generation System Capacity Charge, billed on the AC capacity of the system and set each year in the city fee schedule.
It is not tied to whether you export anything, so a bigger array costs more every month either way.
That flips the usual question.
Inside the city it is not how big an array will fit, it is how much of your own use it covers.
Ask the city for the current fee schedule before you settle on a size.
Pays avoided cost, set month to month, and publishes the history.
There is a monthly minimum you pay whether you export or not and credits do not offset it, plus an application fee per meter.
Unused credits are reconciled once a year and paid by cheque.
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.
Terms vary enough that it is worth checking the current plans before you size anything.
Every North Texas provider's terms are on one page: what each utility pays for exported solar
Weatherford issues a Solar PV System Permit, applied for through the city's permit portal.
The permits the city finaled in 2026 carry a $250 fee.
The city has not published a ground-mount height limit or a solar-specific setback that we can find, so the array gets measured against the ordinary accessory-structure and zoning setbacks for your lot.
Parker County does not issue building permits at all.
That is the county's own published position.
It is not a free pass: septic, floodplain and the utility's interconnection approval all still apply.
We pull whichever applies.
You do not chase either office.
Expect rock or clay around Weatherford as often as sand.
We pulled the soil survey at four points around the city and got clay in the middle of town, fine sandy loam northwest, and bedrock at both of the other two.
That is why we pull the soil map for your parcel before quoting a foundation.
Rock near the surface means a different foundation and a slower trench, and both of those are money.
Weatherford sits on the Western Cross Timbers, so sandy and loamy ground weathered out of sandstone and shale is common, with shallow limestone east toward the Grand Prairie and shale-derived clay that swells and shrinks scattered through the county.
None of the three is bad ground.
They are three different jobs, and which one you have is a question about your parcel, not your city.
A south-facing array at the thirty-degree tilt we build makes about 1,577 kWh a year for every kW installed at Weatherford's latitude.
Run the arithmetic on a 10 kW system and that is roughly 15,800 kWh a year.
Somewhere around that point what your utility pays for the surplus starts to matter more than the panels do, which is why the utility question comes first on this page.
Your number will not be exactly that.
The design tool runs your actual coordinates rather than a county figure, and it accounts for which way your land faces and what is shading it.
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.
We have not found a Weatherford ordinance capping ground-mount height, so inside a subdivision the constraint is usually the HOA, not the city.
On acreage outside a subdivision there is often neither.
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.
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
For the building itself, correct: Parker County does not issue building permits.
You still need your utility's interconnection approval before anything is switched on, and septic and floodplain rules still apply.
Being outside the city removes one office, not all of them.
Depends which lines you are on.
Inside the city it is Weatherford Electric, which sets its own terms under its Distributed Generation policy.
On co-op lines it is Tri-County at avoided cost.
On Oncor lines you choose a retail provider and can switch when the contract ends.
We confirm which before quoting.
Usually, and it costs more.
Rock near the surface stops a driven pile early, so the foundation changes and the trench gets harder.
That is a real number on the quote, not a surprise later.
Sandy ground west of town is the cheaper case; shallow limestone east of town is the dearer one.
Four hundred to six hundred square feet for a normal house.
On an acre that is a corner of the lot.
The constraint on acreage is almost never space — it is how far the array sits from your meter, because the trench between them is priced by the foot.
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.
