Leander is where we live, and the whole town's equipment is the same age

The Leander problem is not old houses. It is old equipment in new houses.

The most recent Census estimates put the median Leander home at built in 2013. Roughly eighty-five percent of the housing here went up after 2000 and under eight percent of it predates 1990. By the standards of this county that is a brand new town.

Which is exactly the problem. A split system that went in with the house in 2013 is thirteen years old this summer, and thirteen is late middle age for a machine that runs in a place averaging twenty-nine days a year at or above one hundred degrees. Builders put those systems in by the street, on the same schedule, from the same supply house, which means the failures do not arrive one at a time either.

When we get four calls in a week from the same subdivision it is almost never a coincidence. It is a cohort. Capacitors first, usually, then contactors, then the compressors that were running hard against a dirty condenser for a couple of summers before anybody noticed.

So the conversation in Leander is rarely "is this thing broken." It is "how much more of this season do you want to buy." Those are different questions and they get different answers, and we would rather have the second one with you in April than in the third week of August. See what we check on an AC repair call and how we handle a replacement.

Gas, which makes Leander odd for how new it is

Just under fifty-six percent of Leander homes heat with utility gas. Atmos Energy is the provider, and the city says so on its own utilities page. That is unusual. Newer towns just west and north of here are overwhelmingly electric, so Leander sits on a line: a gas furnace town with a heat pump town starting a few miles up the road.

Practical consequence. Your furnace runs a handful of weeks a year here, and equipment that sits still for eleven months is equipment that finds out it has a problem on the first genuinely cold night, along with everyone else's. That is the whole argument for lighting it once in October rather than in January. Heating and furnace repair is the short season on this side of the business, and it is the one that gets ignored.

Your electricity comes from Pedernales Electric Cooperative. PEC is member owned, not part of the deregulated retail market, so there is no provider to shop and no rate to switch. PEC has historically run a residential replacement rebate with real conditions attached to it, including a minimum system age and a full replacement rather than a partial one, and the funding on programs like that comes and goes. We check the current status before we put it in a quote rather than after.

Where we actually work in this town

Plat records give you equipment age without anybody guessing. Block House Creek goes back to 1980, which makes it the oldest housing with a Leander address by a wide margin. Crystal Falls started platting in 1993 and kept going into 2016, so it spans three equipment generations inside one name. Summerlyn dates from 2005, Savanna Ranch from 2012, Travisso from 2014, Bryson and Palmera Ridge from 2015. The city's own public improvement districts line up behind that: Oak Creek created in 2014, Crystal Springs and Deerbrooke both in 2017.

Summerlyn is on this list for a reason that has nothing to do with plat records. One of the recommendations that sent people to Two Seasons in the first place came off Nextdoor from there.

And here is where the ETJ business stops being abstract. Several of the places people call Leander are not in the city. Travisso is over in Travis County. Block House Creek is unincorporated and sits in Cedar Park's extraterritorial jurisdiction. Summerlyn and Larkspur fall under Liberty Hill's. Same mailing address, same schools in most cases, genuinely different answer to who inspects your work.

Leander runs about 977 feet above sea level and sits roughly twenty miles from downtown Austin by the city's own figure. High enough to be the first stop on the Hill Country side, close enough that a lot of this town commutes.

Permits, and the line most people do not know is there

Inside Leander city limits, your changeout needs a permit, and the city says so in the least glamorous document it publishes. Its building fee schedule has a heading that reads, in full caps and without embarrassment, miscellaneous building permits: generator, HVAC change out, water softener, EV charger. It is a stand-alone mechanical permit and it is right there in the price list.

Contractors and subcontractors have to be registered with the city before the permit issues, and registration is free, so there is no excuse for a working shop not to have done it. Leander runs the 2021 international code package including the 2021 mechanical code, and the 2023 National Electrical Code. That electrical edition matters more than it sounds: Cedar Park and Liberty Hill next door are both still on the 2020 NEC. Same metro, three years apart in the rulebook.

Now the part that surprises people. The city says that properties outside the city limits but inside the Leander extraterritorial jurisdiction need permits only for signs and for water and wastewater connections. Williamson County does not run a residential building permit program at all. So there are Leander mailing addresses where a full system replacement gets no permit, no inspection, and nobody looking at the work but you.

Out there the state license is the only thing standing between a homeowner and whatever somebody felt like doing. Ours is TACLB00070086C, a Class B air conditioning contractor with the commercial refrigeration endorsement, and you can look it up on the TDLR site in about ninety seconds without taking our word for any of it.

Sources: City of Leander permit requirements, Williamson County construction permits.

Hard water, and where it shows up on your system

Leander drinks Lake Travis. The city buys raw surface water from the LCRA and treats it, partly through the Brushy Creek Regional Utility Authority plant it co-owns with Cedar Park and Round Rock, which is a nice piece of trivia and also the reason three towns on this site share a water chemistry.

Here is where we have to be careful, because a lot of sites are not. Leander does not publish a hardness number. We read the city's water quality reports for two consecutive years and both of them say the same thing: constituents like calcium are secondary and are not required to be reported. There is no calcium figure, no total hardness figure, nothing. Any company quoting you grains per gallon for Leander got it from a water softener sales page.

What can be said honestly is this. Cedar Park draws from the same Lake Travis supply through the same regional authority, and Cedar Park does publish its number: 183 parts per million, about 10.7 grains per gallon, with calcium at 37.4. That is a neighbor's figure for a shared source rather than a measurement of your tap, and that is exactly how we would describe it to you at the door.

Either way the water here is hard enough to matter. You know it from the shower door. What you do not see is the drain pan and the condensate trap, where the same minerals build a crust that eventually backs the line up and drops water through your ceiling in the middle of August.

Starting the third of August 2026 the regional system switches from chloramine to free chlorine for about a month while it does maintenance. It is routine, it is announced, and the taste changes for a few weeks. It does not hurt your air conditioner. It is just the time of year everybody suddenly has questions about their water, which is as good a moment as any to go look at your drain line.

Questions we get asked in Leander driveways

Do I need a permit to replace my AC in Leander?

Inside the city limits, yes. An HVAC change out is named in the city's own building fee schedule as a stand-alone mechanical permit, and the contractor has to be registered before it issues. If your address is in the extraterritorial jurisdiction rather than the city, the city's own page says only signs and water and wastewater connections need permits. We confirm which side of the line you are on before we quote it.

My house is only twelve years old. Why is the air conditioner already failing?

Because the house and the machine do not age at the same rate. Framing and brick do not care about the summer. A compressor that has been cycling since 2013 in this climate has run more hours than the same unit would put on in twenty years somewhere mild. The house is young. The equipment is not.

Is there a rebate through PEC?

Sometimes, and it depends on whether the program is funded when you are actually buying. PEC is a cooperative you are a member of rather than a retailer you shop, so this is not a question about switching providers. Historically the rebate has required a full system replacement and a minimum equipment age. We check it live before it goes in a number, and if there is no money in the program we say so.

You are local. Does that actually mean same day?

Often, in Leander specifically, because there is no drive to absorb. It still depends on what is already on the board that morning. We are open Monday to Friday, 7:00am to 5:00pm and Saturday and Sunday by appointment. You will get a straight answer about today or tomorrow on the phone instead of a promise that turns into a four hour window.

Nearby

Cedar Park is ten minutes down 183A and a completely different housing story. Liberty Hill is eight miles out and newer than we are. Georgetown is about twenty minutes northeast. Lago Vista shares our western ZIP and almost none of our utilities.