Burnet has the oldest houses we would ever be asked to work on

Median build year 1982, and a quarter of the town is from the seventies

Census survey figures give Burnet about 2,614 housing units and a median year built of 1982. The single largest decade is the 1970s at roughly 24.5 percent of everything standing. Add the decades before it and close to half the town predates 1980 outright. Close to sixty percent predates 1990.

Put that next to Round Rock, where the pre-1990 share is around a quarter, and you can see how different this is. Everywhere else we have written about is a town deciding when to replace equipment. Burnet is a town where a lot of the houses were finished before central air conditioning was a normal thing to build into a house at all, which means what is in them now was retrofitted, sometimes twice, by whoever was available at the time.

Retrofits leave fingerprints. Duct chases cut where there was room rather than where the air needed to go. Returns that were undersized on day one and never revisited. An air handler put somewhere accessible instead of somewhere sensible. None of that is anybody's fault and all of it changes the quote, which is why on stock like this we look at the whole path the air takes before saying a word about equipment. That order is spelled out on the replacement page.

The city sells you the electricity, the water and the trash on one bill

This is the second town on this site where the electric utility is the municipality itself rather than a cooperative or a wires company, and it goes further than Georgetown does. Burnet combines electricity, water, wastewater, solid waste and recycling into a single monthly utility bill, and the city describes itself as the sole provider of electric service to residents. The wholesale power behind it comes from the LCRA, which supplies a couple of dozen city utilities around Central Texas.

Practical effect: there is no retail provider to shop and no third party to call when something about the service is wrong. It is one office, and the number on the city's own page is 512-756-6093. Cross the city limit, though, and it changes. Out in the county the cooperative takes over, and PEC keeps a member office down in Bertram.

Natural gas is Atmos Energy, which the city confirmed the hard way in January 2025 by passing a resolution against an Atmos rate increase. Note that gas rates out here are set by the Railroad Commission rather than the utility commission, which is a piece of Texas trivia that only matters until it is your bill.

Here is the number that makes the gas point properly. About 31.6 percent of homes inside the City of Burnet heat with a utility gas main. Across Burnet County as a whole it is 8.5 percent. That gap is the Atmos footprint drawn in data: the main is a town thing, and once you are out of town roughly four homes in five heat electrically and propane slightly outnumbers piped gas. Inside the city, tank gas is only about 2.0 percent, which surprises people who assume propane everywhere out here.

The water is worth naming correctly, because most people guess wrong and say Lake Buchanan. Burnet's own quality report lists its intake on Inks Lake, the Highland Lake immediately below Buchanan Dam, treated at the plant out on Park Road 4, plus two active Cheatham wells and a city well system serving parts of the community. What that report does not contain, anywhere, is a hardness figure. Texas does not require utilities to publish secondary constituents and Burnet does not. So we will not print grains per gallon for this town the way we can for Round Rock. Surface water off the Highland Lakes is generally more moderate than the well water around it, and that is as far as the evidence goes.

Source: City of Burnet public utilities.

Bertram, eleven miles back down the road

Bertram sits on 29 between Liberty Hill and Burnet, and the City of Liberty Hill's own distance table puts it eleven miles out from there. About 2,037 people and 874 housing units, with a median year built of 1983 and roughly 54.7 percent of it standing before 1990, so the same era problem as Burnet in a smaller package.

The utilities are arranged differently though, and it is worth knowing which questions to ask whom. Bertram's city utility department handles water, sewer and trash but not electricity, which is the cooperative's. And where Burnet drinks treated surface water, Bertram runs a groundwater system. Two towns ten miles apart on the same highway, different water entirely.

Bertram has one detail we have not seen anywhere else in this service area, and it is a genuine curiosity. Twenty-two households, about 2.7 percent of the town, report heating with fuel oil or kerosene. Nowhere else on this site reports a single one. Another 6.2 percent run on tank gas and 74.0 percent are electric.

We mention it because it is the sort of thing that decides whether a contractor showing up is useful or not. A house on kerosene heat is not a house anybody's standard changeout script covers, and if that is you, say so on the phone before anyone drives nineteen miles to find out.

Higher, further, and in a different county

Point elevations from the USGS national elevation dataset put Burnet around 1,284 feet and Bertram around 1,255. That makes Burnet the highest ground of anywhere on this site, better than three hundred feet above Leander and around six hundred feet above Hutto out on the other end of the service area.

It is also in Burnet County, not Williamson, and that matters because the rule we rely on further east does not hold here. Williamson County runs no residential building permit program. Burnet County's own website says the opposite in plain words: it requires building and septic permits, and you need the building permit before you can get the septic one.

Read that carefully before you panic, because it is narrower than it sounds. The county's permit is a floodplain and septic gateway, not a construction code review. Outside the flood hazard boundary it is the cheap class and the county states outright that no inspections of the structure are required. The application has no mechanical, electrical or plumbing section on it at all. In practice a changeout on an existing rural house almost certainly triggers nothing. But "the county requires permits" is what the county actually says, so we are not going to tell you it requires none. Their number is 512-756-5445.

Inside the city it is unambiguous. Burnet's building page lists installing or replacing heating and air conditioning equipment as work that requires a permit. Ordinance 2025-07 moved the city onto the 2021 international codes with the 2023 National Electrical Code, replacing a package that had been sitting on the 2015 codes and the 2014 electrical, which is a real jump. New residential work also gets a mechanical rough-in inspection and a blower door and duct leakage test before anybody gets a certificate of occupancy. Permits go through the My Government Online portal and development services is 512-715-3206.

Source: City of Burnet building permits.

The drive is the other honest constraint. Forty minutes each way is eighty minutes of a two-person day gone before anyone picks up a gauge set. That does not make the work worse. It makes the scheduling different, and it is the reason a page like this has to be honest about response times instead of implying somebody is around the corner.

What gets asked out here

Is Burnet too far for you?

Possibly, and you deserve that answer on the phone rather than after you have waited a day. Forty minutes each way out of a two-person shop is a genuine constraint. If the honest answer is tomorrow morning rather than this afternoon, that is what you will be told.

My house is from 1974 and the AC was added later. Does that change anything?

It changes almost everything. Houses of that vintage were not designed around ductwork, so what got installed later had to fit where there was space. That usually shows up as restricted returns and long, awkward supply runs, and it means the honest first step is measuring airflow rather than pricing a box.

Do you charge extra for the mileage?

The visit is $75, same as it is in town. What the distance changes is how a day gets built around it, not the price on the invoice.

I heat with kerosene. Is that something you deal with?

Tell us on the phone. A couple of dozen households around Bertram still report it and it is not something a standard residential HVAC visit is set up for. Better to find out before the eighteen mile drive than during it.

Nearby

Liberty Hill is the halfway point on 29 and about as opposite as housing gets from this. Lago Vista is the other end of the Highland Lakes. The service area page lists every drive time we publish.