Aug. 11--More than 900 Jacksonville households could have their water cut off -- most just for their lawns, but some for their homes -- because of a simple design problem in their plumbing.

That discovery has triggered a lawsuit by some residents of the Bartram Park area against a builder, Beazer Homes, which JEA says is still building homes with the same issue.

It has also unsettled and frustrated homeowners who could be forced to pay about $225 apiece -- maybe more -- for plumbing repairs across entire subdivisions.

"To cut off a person's water is a little much. I can't imagine [that]," said Fran Greelish, a retired nurse who bought a townhome in the Stonefield subdivision in 2004.

"It seems like everybody is trying to hit us in the pocketbook."

The homes in Bartram Park, off Interstate 95 near the St. Johns County line, passed construction inspections as they were built over the past five years. And the city says the problem isn't covered by Florida's plumbing code.

But JEA, which supplies water to the area, says the plumbing doesn't meet a separate state environmental rule written to protect drinking water from being contaminated with recycled sewer water that's used for watering lawns.

The recycled water is heavily cleaned before it's reused, but the environmental rule is a way to guarantee bacteria won't be introduced into drinking water if someone connects the two water lines. That plumbing mistake happens sometimes, and has happened in Northeast Florida, said Van Hoofnagle, administrator for the drinking water program at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

A simple device called a backflow preventer should be installed at each house to keep the water systems separate, said Dan Parnell, who manages JEA's industrial pretreatment program.

Sprinklers at Bartram Park are tied together in networks covering an entire subdivision, so JEA says every home needs a preventer to make using the irrigation system safe.

Plans for using recycled water were written into the first development permits the city issued for Bartram Park in 2000. But JEA didn't install water lines that could carry the recycled water to that area until May 2007, so drinking water was used in sprinklers before then.

After pipelines for recycled water were installed, JEA inspectors checked the subdivisions and realized in 2008 there were no preventers, a JEA spokeswoman, Gerri Boyce, wrote by e-mail.

JEA began talking to builders and homeowner associations about correcting the problem last year, Parnell said. When it didn't get a solution, the utility began setting deadlines.