Water treatment in Highland Lake Estates, TX is close-to-home work for us. Highland Lake Estates is about five miles from our Spicewood base as the heron flies, and about forty-three by road, because there is no bridge across Lake Travis. You go around: east over the dam on RM 620, or the long way west through Marble Falls. We can see the north shore from our side of the water, but we just cannot drive to it in under an hour and a quarter, and that shapes how we schedule here.
What the two shores share is the lake itself. Highland Lake Estates is not a city. It is a 1974 subdivision at the south tip of the Lago Vista peninsula, inside the city limits, and every lot in it drinks City of Lago Vista water pulled from Lake Travis at two plants, WTP1 and WTP3, with no groundwater in the mix. Over the last three years that lake has gone from 48 percent full to brimming, and a house on Highland Lake Drive or Crystal Way felt every step of it at the tap. So this page follows the calendar.
March: the council reads the gauge
Spring in the Highland Lakes is decided in a council chamber. When combined storage in Lakes Buchanan and Travis fell below 900,000 acre-feet, Lago Vista moved to Stage 2 restrictions (once-a-week watering) on March 8, 2024 and again on March 20, 2025, with Lake Travis near 48 percent. A low lake is a warm lake that holds more organic material and takes more disinfectant to treat, and the tap tells you so. Spring is also when the Balcones Songbird Festival and the first warm weekends bring second-home owners back to houses that have sat since fall, and that is the question second-home owners run into: why is the water heater in a place used forty days a year already scaled? Because the plants make the water safe, not soft. Lago Vista's reports publish no hardness number. The nearest comparable plant treating the same raw Lake Travis water conventionally, WCID 17 across the lake, reports 182 to 185 mg/L, roughly 10.6 to 10.8 grains per gallon. We test at your tap rather than quote that figure, but it tells you what to expect.
July 2026: full pool, and everything that came in with it
On July 17, 2026 Lake Travis reached full pool, 681 feet, for the first time since 2019, on the back of the Hill Country floods. The floodgates at Mansfield Dam opened, Lago Vista's city manager warned about low-lying spots that had not seen water in years, and the next day Austin and Travis County banned activity on the lake. A refilled lake is a muddy lake. The storms that ended the drought carried sediment and debris down every draw on the peninsula, and Highland Lake Estates sits on thin Brackett soil over limestone with about a fifth of the surface in bare rock, where runoff moves fast and dirty into the coves. The city plants handle most of that; in July and August 2025 they also logged turbidity treatment-technique violations, which is what raw-lake variability looks like on paper. At the house, a whole-house sediment stage ahead of everything else is the first thing we would specify on this side of the lake.
August into October: warm water, sharper taste, turnover
Late summer is peak lake use and peak disinfectant. The city's residual, a chlorine-based disinfectant, averaging 2.2 ppm in the 2024 report with a range of 0.4 to 3.9, is dosed hardest when the water is warmest, and warm, algae-rich lake water is also when the Highland Lakes throw their earthy taste and odor. The byproducts follow: Lago Vista's 2024 running annual average for total trihalomethanes was 59 ppb, with samples to 67.1, under the 80 ppb limit but not by a wide margin. Catalytic carbon at the point of entry handles the disinfectant whichever form the city runs (it switched to free chlorine for a month in June 2020), and reverse osmosis at the kitchen tap takes the byproducts out of the water you actually drink. Then the lake turns over in the fall, and the taste shifts again.
Thanksgiving weekend 2025: the notice at the Highland Lake end
Between November 28 and December 2, 2025 an 18-inch transmission line failed, WTP3 went offline, the Golf Ball Tank drained, and the city issued a boil-water notice for customers south of Dawn Drive near Lohman Ford Road, the Highland Lake Estates end of the peninsula. Lago Vista High School closed on December 1. A notice like that pushes stale water and sediment through the mains as pressure returns, and it is the moment a homeowner wants two things: sediment filtration the whole house drinks through, and a disinfection backup. We install Viqua UV systems for exactly that purpose, and our water purification page explains how UV sits behind a city supply. It is not a substitute for boiling during a notice; it is what makes the week after one uneventful.
Winter and the weekend-house problem
The subdivision is USDA Zone 9a, annual extreme lows of 20 to 25 degrees, a notch warmer than Spicewood, but February 2021 put Central Texas communities under boil notices all the same, and view lots at 780 to 920 feet leave softener drain lines and dock pump houses exposed. Winter is also when a good share of Highland Lake Estates goes quiet. Lago Vista's city figures (the subdivision has no census geography of its own) run to a median age of 54, 89.6 percent owner-occupied, a $420,000 median home value, and 506 vacant units, many of them seasonal. A softener that regenerates on a timer in an empty house wastes salt and water; a demand-initiated one waits. On the septic streets, sewer versus on-site systems varies street by street in the 1974 sections, demand-initiated is also what Texas requires.
Docks, pumps and the water nobody treats
Arrowhead Point, Bowie Cove and the Boggy Ford coves carry lakefront homes with private docks, and the Lago Vista POA runs nine lakefront parks and four boat ramps. Most dock pumps here feed irrigation under LCRA's domestic-use raw-water rules, and that water is untreated: post-flood sediment, late-summer algae, and zebra mussels, which the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department lists as fully infesting Lake Travis. Screening and sediment filtration keep a pump alive; if lake water is going anywhere near the house, surface-water treatment is a full train, tested first. One thing you will not find on these lots is a well: city water is universal on the platted lots, no groundwater district covers Lago Vista, and the deep Trinity wells of the rural fringe out toward Nameless Road and Cow Creek are a different job. Our well water treatment page covers those.
Getting around the lake to you
The houses are as varied as the seasons: 1970s and 80s ranches along Highland Lake Drive and Constitution Drive with their original copper, the circa-1980 patio homes of The Oaks at Highland Lake Estates, 1,800-to-3,800-square-foot new builds going up beside them on a plat that is still filling in (236 listings in August 2026, most of them vacant quarter-acre lots), and the American Drive condos and The Island on Lake Travis, where shared risers call for point-of-use treatment rather than a salt softener. The old golf course in the middle closed in 2017 and is now the city's 111-acre effluent meadow. Absolute Water Solutions has been in business since 2003, over 1,000 projects in, every one done by our own crews, TCEQ-licensed (WT001370) and insured. We schedule Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm, and the drive is about 75 minutes each way, so we plan the trip with care. Call (512) 587-8188 or request a free estimate and tell us which cove you are on.