A water softener in Lakeway, TX often shares a mechanical room with a lake pump, and the two have to be specified together. Picture a Saturday in Lakeway. The dock pump is pushing raw Lake Travis water onto the lawn under an LCRA domestic-use contract. There is a tee time at Flintrock Falls or the Hills Country Club, then friends on the patio and an outdoor kitchen that gets more use than the one inside. The house cost eight hundred thousand dollars or a good deal more. The frameless glass shower door still spots every single morning.
That is the honest paradox of living here. Lakeway was born as a resort (the 1963 Lakeway Inn, the airpark, World of Tennis, later the Rough Hollow yacht club), and it grew into one of the most affluent cities in the region: a median household income around $190,000, 86 percent owner-occupied, a median age near 50. People buy in for the water. Then the water, once it reaches the tap, quietly works against every surface they paid for.
Absolute Water Solutions has treated water in this corner of the Hill Country since 2003, and Lakeway is the nearest full-size city to our Spicewood home base, closer than some of Spicewood's own subdivisions. This page is about where the lake life and the tap water meet, and what we do about it.
The water behind the lifestyle
Six retail systems serve the city limits (Lakeway MUD, Travis County WCID 17, Hurst Creek MUD, and the Travis County MUDs behind Rough Hollow and Lakeway Highlands), and every one of them is ultimately delivering Lake Travis or Lake Austin water bought from LCRA. Lakeway MUD alone lifts its raw water 300 feet or more out of the lake to reach the plateau. What comes out the tap is your problem, and the three published 2025 water-quality reports agree on it almost to the decimal: 184 ppm hardness at Lakeway MUD, 185 ppm at WCID 17 (its own report converts that to 10.73 grains per gallon and calls it "moderately hard to hard"), and 184 ppm on the WTCPUA water Rough Hollow has been receiving. That is limestone-country water, about 10.7 gpg, and it is why the glass spots, the tankless heater in the new build throws a scale code, and the outdoor kitchen faucet grows a white collar within a season.
The second thing every Lakeway system shares is chloramine. Lakeway MUD's residual averages 2.4 ppm; WCID 17's averages 2.42. Chloramine is chlorine bonded with ammonia, it does not gas off the way plain chlorine does, and it is hard on aquariums, RO membranes and the standard carbon block inside a builder-grade filter. Whole-house removal calls for catalytic carbon, not the ordinary kind.
Then there are the by-products. Lakeway MUD's 2025 report logged a single trihalomethane sample at 106 ppb (within the rules, because the 80 ppb limit applies to a running average and the average was 60.1), but it is the kind of warm-month spike that makes people who actually read their water report ask for a reverse osmosis system at the kitchen sink. WCID 17 also disclosed a trace PFAS detection in 2023. Low numbers, honestly reported; still a reason the drinking-water tap gets its own treatment in this town.
Same lake, very different houses
Old Lakeway's first seventeen sections were platted between 1962 and 1971: mid-century houses on winding lanes under live oaks between Lakeway Boulevard and the water, plus Texas's first patio-home condos. Roughly a thousand of those lots are still on septic under LCRA's 2,000-foot lake rule, with Lakeway MUD's grinder-pump sewer arriving street by street. A softener on a septic system must be demand-initiated regeneration under Texas law, so every water softener we install in Old Lakeway meters actual use rather than regenerating on a timer, which also keeps brine off a drainfield sitting on shallow rock. Those houses often carry 1960s and 70s copper or galvanized runs, and the resale inspections that force old tanks up to code are a good moment to re-plumb a proper treatment loop.
The Hills of Lakeway and Flintrock Falls are the gated golf-and-tennis tier: Mediterranean estates, multi-bath floor plans, a great deal of glass and stone, and HOAs that care where an exterior tank goes. Rough Hollow, Lakeway Highlands, Serene Hills and The Preserve at Lakeway are the 2000s-to-2020s stock (59 percent of the city's homes were built after 2000) with pre-plumbed softener loops in the garage, PEX, and tankless heaters that scale fast on 10.7-grain water. The builder-grade unit on that loop is usually the first thing a new owner replaces. For these houses we typically design a whole-house system: sediment, catalytic carbon for the chloramine, softening sized to the fixture count, and RO for the drinking tap and the fridge line.
Condo owners at Tuscan Village, World of Tennis or the Rough Hollow condos share risers, so we work at the point of use: an under-sink RO and a chloramine-rated filter for the refrigerator.
Dry years, flood years, and the dock
Lake living here comes with a memory. Lake Travis fell to a record 34 percent full in 2023; Lakeway MUD went to Stage 3 that August and added drought surcharges on bills above 30,000 gallons per two-month cycle. The July 2025 floods refilled the lake to 89 percent and the district dropped back to Stage 1. Both extremes touch water treatment: a demand-initiated softener uses far less water and salt per regeneration than an old timer unit, which matters under a surcharge, and post-flood turbidity is when whole-house sediment stages earn their keep. Waterfront owners with LCRA lake pumps in Old Lakeway and Rough Hollow have dealt with zebra mussels on intakes since 2017. That is irrigation water, not drinking water, but screened intakes and sediment pre-filtration keep the pump running.
One more date. On September 4, 2026 the Travis County MUDs serving Rough Hollow and Lakeway Highlands folded into Lakeway MUD, and the treated water reaching those homes is moving from the WTCPUA plant to Lakeway MUD's expanded one. It is a sensible moment to re-test and reset softener hardness settings.
How a Lakeway visit works
Every recommendation starts with a water test at your tap, because the district you are in, and the plumbing you have, decides the design. Bret and our own crews do the install; nothing is subcontracted, and we have completed over 1,000 projects that way. We are TCEQ-licensed (WT001370) and insured, we schedule during business hours Monday through Friday, and the drive from Spicewood is about twelve minutes to the Highlands and under half an hour out to Flintrock.
Call (512) 587-8188 or request a free estimate, and we will bring the test kit to the lake.