Water treatment in Austin, TX starts with knowing which utility serves your street, then testing what actually reaches your tap. Absolute Water Solutions sizes carbon, softening, sediment and UV stages to that result. Part of the local background is familiar to every resident: Austin Water has issued three citywide boil notices in four years. October 22, 2018, after the Llano River flood pushed Highland Lakes turbidity past 400 NTU and the Ullrich plant could not clear it. February 17, 2021, when Winter Storm Uri cut Ullrich's power for three hours and thousands of burst pipes drained the reservoirs. February 5, 2022, when an overnight crew over-seeded a basin with calcium-carbonate slurry and turbidity went over the limit. Each notice covered the whole city and its wholesale districts, West Lake Hills included, and each one ended with system flushing that can carry sediment into home plumbing, which a simple prefilter catches.
Absolute Water Solutions, based in Spicewood and in business since 2003, serves west and northwest Austin. The boil notices get the headlines, but most everyday water questions here are about chloramine, hardness and taste. This page takes each one in turn, along with the fix that goes with it.
What the three boil notices mean for west Austin homes
A flood, a freeze and a human error each put the treatment plants out of the picture for a time, and during each one a home from Lost Creek to Avery Ranch relied on whatever point-of-entry treatment it had. For most homes that was none, and that is simple to change.
A sediment prefilter and a UV stage do not replace Austin Water and will not make a notice go away. What they do is catch the grit and discoloration that arrives when mains are flushed afterward, and hold a disinfection backstop at the point of entry while the system recovers. That is why we raise water purification with Austin homeowners in a dry October rather than the week the alert lands.
The smell of February 2019
The event that never became a boil notice is the one people remember. Zebra mussels reached Lake Travis in June 2017 and Lake Austin that August. In February 2019, a Ullrich raw-water line carrying mussel remains from a two-week shutdown was returned to service without cleaning, and 311 logged 2,451 complaints describing tap water that smelled like pond water. Austin Water fixed it with powdered activated carbon and flushing, added a copper-sulfate feed in 2020, and now doses carbon year-round. Mussels remain established in both lakes, seasonal mussel and algae cycles in Lake Austin recur, and raw-water threshold odor measured 4 TON in the third quarter of 2025. The utility manages that at the plant; at home, catalytic carbon takes lake taste and odor out at the tap.
Chloramine at 2.3 ppm, and what a pitcher filter misses
Every neighborhood on this page is disinfected with chloramine, not plain chlorine. Austin Water averaged 2.3 ppm in 2025; Travis County WCID 17 in Steiner Ranch averaged 2.42, and Travis County MUD 4 in Barton Creek 2.23. Chloramine is chlorine bonded to ammonia, stable enough that an ordinary carbon pitcher barely dents it. It also wears out toilet flappers and faucet gaskets, and it has to come out before water reaches an RO membrane.
The byproducts matter too. Lake water carries about 4.3 mg/L of organic carbon, and disinfecting it forms trihalomethanes. Austin Water's 2025 TTHM average was 40.5 ppb; WCID 17's highest running average reached 57.6. Both sit under the 80 ppb federal limit, and both run higher at the far ends of long west-side mains. Catalytic carbon is the correct medium for chloramine, and it is the spec we use for whole-home water filtration in Austin.
Two waters: 5.4 grains or 10.7
Here is the fact that surprises most west Austin homeowners. Austin Water lime-softens its Lake Austin and Lake Travis water at all three plants, bringing hardness to an average of 93 mg/L, 5.4 grains per gallon, with a finished pH near 9.7. River Place, Lost Creek, Circle C, Jester Estates, Great Hills and Avery Ranch get that water. So do West Lake Hills and the original Rob Roy Ranch through Water District 10, which buys wholesale from Austin Water.
Steiner Ranch and Barton Creek do not. WCID 17 runs its own membrane plants on Lake Travis and does not soften: 185 mg/L, 10.73 gpg. MUD 4's Lake Austin plant serving Barton Creek averages 183 mg/L. That is double the hardness a mile away, and it is why a tankless heater in Steiner Ranch scales up faster than the same unit in Circle C. Even the softened Austin Water leaves a chalk film on shower glass and heat exchangers because of that high pH; the utility describes the lime process as helping coat pipes. Water softeners in the district neighborhoods are a straightforward hard-water fix; in Austin Water neighborhoods they are a scale-control decision we size from a test, not a default. Austin's plumbing code requires demand-initiated regeneration, no more than 4 gallons per 1,000 grains removed, and a permit, so the 1990s timer softeners in Circle C garages get replaced with metered units.
Common questions: PFAS, lead and fluoride
PFAS: Austin Water's sampling through 2024 found little to none, with three of six soon-regulated compounds not detected and the rest below the 2027 limits. Lead: Austin Water confirmed in 2025 that its system has no lead service lines, and the 2024 90th-percentile result was under 1 ppb, though pre-1986 homes in Lost Creek, Great Hills and Westlake still carry lead-solder copper and some galvanized line. Fluoride runs about 0.66 ppm citywide and 0.7 in WCID 17, whose own report advises demineralized water for infant formula. Those are reverse osmosis conversations at the kitchen tap, and they begin with a test rather than a pitch.
From Spicewood to your side of the lake
We are based in Spicewood, about 19 road miles from Steiner Ranch, 20 from West Lake Hills, 22 from Circle C and 29 from Avery Ranch, 35 to 50 minutes on TX-71 and RM 620 outside the weekday peaks. Visits are scheduled Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm. Absolute Water Solutions is TCEQ-licensed (WT001370) and insured, every job is done by our own crews, and more than 1,000 projects have been completed since 2003. Call (512) 587-8188 or Get Free Estimate.