County service area
Standby Generator Installation in Erath County, TX
Three quarters of the houses in this county heat with electricity, and exactly two towns in it have a gas utility. That pairing makes an outage here a heat problem, not a lighting problem.
The defining number
74.8 percent electric heat
Of everywhere we work, this county depends on the electric meter for warmth more than any other. It is the fact that should shape every proposal written here, and almost nobody mentions it.
Heat pumps and electric furnaces. When the meter stops, the heat stops, and there is nothing else in the house that makes any.
The lowest share of any location in our territory, because only two towns in the county have a gas utility at all.
Six to seven times the Tarrant County rate. Where there is a tank already, half the fuel conversation is done.
From a county of about 44,500 people. That is what building on land looks like in a government dataset.
During Winter Storm Uri, Dallas–Fort Worth spent 139 consecutive hours at or below freezing, and the Texas Comptroller found that 31 percent of surveyed Texans came out of that week with water damage at home. In a county where three quarters of houses have no combustion heat source, that is not an abstract statistic. It is a description of what a long February outage does to the plumbing.
An all-electric house also carries a heavier backed-up load than a gas-heated house of the same size, which pushes the machine size up. That is where load management earns its money, and why we start with a load calculation rather than a model number.
Fuel
A county that makes gas and mostly cannot buy it
Erath County hosts two of the largest renewable natural gas plants in North America, turning dairy manure into pipeline gas. It also has exactly two communities with an investor-owned gas distribution utility: Stephenville, with about 2,388 residential Atmos consumers, and Dublin, with about 715. Outside those two city limits, there is no main to tie into.
So propane is not the compromise position here. It is the plan. A 500-gallon tank is a common starting point for a 22 kW unit carrying a house through a multi-day outage, and the design details that matter are regulator sizing, the ten-foot separation between tank and generator, and vaporization capacity when it is cold and the tank is low. Getting the last one wrong produces a machine that runs beautifully in October and stumbles in February.
Where there is a gas meter, the question becomes capacity rather than availability: a 22 kW unit at full load wants roughly 289 cubic feet an hour on top of the existing appliances, and plenty of older runs cannot deliver that at the far end.
Property character
The newest houses we work on, on the most land
This is not a declining rural county. It has the newest housing stock in our whole service area and the second-highest median home value.
What the numbers say
- 18,694 housing units, 65.6 percent single-unit detached
- 14.7 percent manufactured housing
- Median year built 1991, with 37.4 percent built since 2000
- Median home value $269,100
- 63.1 percent owner-occupied
Population rose from 42,543 in 2020 to about 44,496 by 2024, though the migration flow has turned outward in the last couple of years. Steady rather than booming, and we would rather say so.
What it means on site
New construction on acreage is the textbook profile for a whole-home standby system: a modern service, a clean panel, room to site a pad, and a load list that already includes a well pump and a septic aerator. Those jobs go in cleanly and carry the whole house rather than a handful of circuits. The full scope is on our standby installation page.
Manufactured homes are a real part of this market too, and they are not a problem, just a different approach: service entrance arrangement, transfer switch mounting, pad relative to the skirting and tie downs, and the fuel line route. There are only two incorporated cities in the entire county, so nearly everything else is county land, on septic, on a well or a small supply corporation.
The utilities
The co-op out here started as this county’s own
Three utilities file territory in Erath County, and one of them was born in it.
United Cooperative Services
Formed in April 2000 by the consolidation of Erath County Electric Cooperative and Johnson County Electric Cooperative. Plenty of people still say ECEC; the entity itself has been United for twenty-five years. Fourteen counties, roughly 110,000 meters and nearly 9,300 miles of energized line, with an office in Stephenville.
Oncor and TNMP
Both are delivery utilities in the competitive retail market, so the company on your bill is not the company that restores your power. Oncor reported an average of 558.8 minutes off per customer in 2021 and 532.5 minutes in 2024, filed with the federal government and inclusive of major storm days.
February 2021, still on the bill
Uri pushed Brazos Electric into Chapter 11 on a $2.1 billion ERCOT invoice. United’s share settled near $440 million and was securitized as $451 million in bonds in December 2022, recovered from members through a Power Cost Recovery Factor from January 2023, starting at 1.17 cents per kilowatt hour over roughly 28 years.
United’s own reliability figures are among the better ones in the state outside the Uri year: 811.3 minutes per member in 2021, then 108.4, 186.6 and 111.8 minutes across the three years since. The exposure here is weather rather than wholesale markets. On 19 April 2025 the National Weather Service confirmed an EF-1 tornado in this county with peak winds near 110 mph, on the same day as a confirmed EF-1 in Parker County. Restoration everywhere runs transmission, feeders, tap lines, then individual services, so a meter at the end of a long county-road tap waits longest by design.
What we do here
Houses, dairies, shops and new builds
Santo, Gordon and Strawn ISDs all cross into this county from ours, which is a fair description of how connected the two are.
Standby Generator Installation
Whole-home propane systems for acreage, and Atmos tie-ins inside the two towns that have gas.
See detailsCommercial Generators
Dairies, ag operations, clinics and small facilities, where an outage is a working-capital problem.
See detailsGenerator Sizing
All-electric heat plus a submersible pump makes for a bigger number than most people expect.
See detailsLoad Management
The cheapest way to keep an all-electric house on one machine size rather than the next one up.
See detailsGenerator Maintenance
Scheduled service that keeps the machine ready and the warranty documented. First year included.
See detailsElectrical Panel Upgrades
Service capacity for older farmsteads and for properties that have grown a shop and a second well.
See details
Nearby
This county and the ones beside it
Two incorporated cities here, and a lot of country between them and us.
- Stephenville, TXThe county seat, on Atmos gas and thirty-five municipal water wells.
- Santo, TXNorth in Palo Pinto County, where our shop is and where Santo ISD reaches into Erath.
- Palo Pinto County, TXThe county north of here, with five electric utilities in it.
- Parker County, TXNortheast, with three electric regimes and no county building permits either.
Common questions
Erath County questions
Heat, fuel, permits, utilities and dairy, which is roughly the order they matter in out here.
Why is an outage worse here than in a gas-heated county?
Because most homes have no combustion heat at all. The American Community Survey puts Erath County at 74.8 percent electric heat, 16.7 percent piped gas and 7.0 percent bottled propane. That is the most electricity-dependent profile anywhere in our service area. In a January outage, a gas-heated house is dark but warm. Three quarters of the houses here are dark and cooling, and on a private well they lose water at the same moment. That is a life-safety argument rather than a comfort one.
Which towns can actually get natural gas?
Two, and they are the county’s only two incorporated cities. Atmos Energy Mid-Tex serves Stephenville with about 2,388 residential consumers and Dublin with about 715, per the Railroad Commission of Texas. Nowhere else in the county appears in that registry. So outside those two city limits the fuel decision is propane, and the tank has to be sized for the generator rather than for the range and the water heater.
Do I need a building permit out in the county?
Erath County does not issue building permits in its unincorporated areas, so an install there is governed by the National Electrical Code, the manufacturer’s instructions and contractor licensing rather than a plan review. Septic is the exception: the county is the TCEQ-designated authorized agent and issued 264 new on-site sewage authorizations in 2025 and 259 in 2024. In a typical recent year the county records many times more septic permits than building permits, which is a fair picture of how people build out here.
Am I on Oncor, the co-op, or TNMP?
All three file service territory in this county with the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Oncor and Texas-New Mexico Power are delivery utilities in the competitive retail market, so a provider of your choosing bills you and the wire company restores you. United Cooperative Services is member-owned, with no retail choice, and it keeps an office in Stephenville. Look at the top of the bill; that is the fastest reliable answer, and we confirm it before we quote.
Do you do standby power for dairies and ag operations?
Yes, and it is scoped like commercial work. The USDA counted 58,000 milk cows in this county in 2023, down from 64,000 the year before, alongside 36,500 beef cows. A dairy that loses power loses the milking parlour, the vacuum system and bulk tank cooling, so an outage becomes a direct financial loss rather than an inconvenience. Those designs get prioritized circuits, a transfer switch matched to the service, and an honest conversation about what the machine will carry and what it will not.
We are building new on acreage. When should we call?
Before the slab, ideally. This county has the newest housing stock of anywhere we work, with a median year built of 1991 and 37 percent of the stock built since 2000. On a new build, running the conduit, siting the pad, sizing the service and coordinating the propane tank while the trenches are already open costs a fraction of doing it afterwards. Even where the generator itself is a year or two away, the rough-in is cheap now and expensive later.
Related
Keep reading
- Commercial GeneratorsStandby power for dairies, ag operations and small facilities.
- Generator SizingLoad calculations for all-electric homes with wells and septic systems.
- Standby Generator InstallationThe full scope, from design and permitting to a live grid-failure test.
- StephenvilleThe county seat, and the co-op that was born here.
- Load ManagementHow a smaller generator carries a bigger all-electric house.
- Maintenance PlansAnnual and bi-annual service across the county.
Two ways to start
Which one are you?
Need a generator
We start with what has to keep running at your property — the well, the AC, the freezer, the shop — and size the system around it. You get a written proposal with the equipment, the electrical work and the site prep all in one number.
Already own one
Repair, diagnostics and scheduled maintenance for Generac, Kohler and Briggs & Stratton systems — including units another company installed. Tell us the brand and what it is doing and we will bring the right parts.