First: find out whether you are leaking
This takes ten minutes and is worth more than everything else on this page.
Turn off every tap and water-using appliance, including the ice maker and irrigation. Go to the meter and note the reading — or watch the small flow indicator dial, which spins if anything at all is moving. Wait an hour with nothing running and check again.
If it has moved, water is going somewhere. That is not conservation advice; that is a leak, and it is running twenty-four hours a day.
The two most common culprits are a running toilet, which can be silent, and a slab leak, which announces itself with a bill up 20-40%, a warm patch on the floor, or water audible with everything off.
Worth knowing
The food colouring test settles toilets in fifteen minutes: a few drops in the tank, do not flush, and check the bowl. Colour in the bowl means the flapper is leaking. Do this on every toilet in the house — a silent one wastes just as much as a noisy one.
Second: irrigation, which is where the volume is
In most Hill Country homes with a sprinkler system, irrigation is the single largest use of water — frequently more than everything indoors combined during summer. It is also the least examined.
Water deeply and less often. Frequent shallow watering keeps roots near the surface where they dry out fastest. Fewer, longer cycles push roots down and produce a lawn that needs less water overall.
Water early. Before dawn is best. Midday watering loses a substantial share to evaporation before it reaches the roots; evening watering leaves foliage wet overnight, which invites disease.
Check the heads. Broken, misaligned or sunken heads waste enormous volumes, and because irrigation runs when nobody is watching, this goes unnoticed for months. Walk the system while it runs, once a season.
Fit a rain sensor if there is not one, and check the one you have — they fail, and a system that irrigates during rainfall is the most visible waste there is.
Adjust seasonally. A controller set for July and left alone runs the same schedule in October. That single adjustment saves more than most indoor measures.
Third: fixtures
Worth doing, and genuinely secondary to the two above.
Aerators are the cheapest upgrade in plumbing. They cost a few dollars and reduce flow without a noticeable difference at the tap.
Showerheads matter more, since showering is the largest indoor use after toilets. A modern efficient head is a real reduction. If yours has poor flow, descale it before replacing it — on our water that is often the actual problem.
Toilets. A pre-1994 toilet may use three to five gallons per flush against 1.28 for a modern one. On the most-used fixture in the house, that is the largest single fixture upgrade available.
Appliances. Worth considering at replacement time rather than as a reason to replace something that works — the water saved rarely justifies scrapping a functioning machine.
Fourth: habits, and why they are last
They are not pointless. They are simply smaller than the things above, and putting them first is why people take shorter showers for a month and see no change on the bill.
Turning the tap off while brushing, running dishwashers and washing machines only when full, keeping drinking water in the fridge instead of running the tap cold, and thawing food in the fridge rather than under running water all save something.
The one habit with real weight is shower length, because showering is a large share of indoor use.
But a household that shortens every shower while a toilet flapper leaks silently in the guest bathroom is losing that ground and more. Fix the leak, then adjust the habits.
The Hill Country specifics
Check your restrictions. Boerne and the surrounding water systems impose drought stages that limit irrigation days and times. Watering outside those windows is both wasteful and, in most stages, a violation.
On a well, conservation is about the aquifer and your pump. There is no bill, which removes the usual feedback — but drawing hard during a drought affects your own supply and your neighbours'. Extended pump run times are also wear you pay for eventually.
A softener has a water cost too. Regeneration uses water, and an oversized or badly configured unit regenerates more often than it needs to. Sizing it correctly is a conservation measure as well as a salt one — see sizing a softener.
Hot water is two resources. Every gallon of hot water wasted is also the gas or electricity used to heat it, which is why insulating the first few feet of hot pipe and fixing a hot-side drip pays twice.