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Common Tile Installation Failures
The trade of tile installation is very difficult, out right. Simpler installations, such as small single room flat floors, or kitchen backsplashes, may be achievable in DIY settings, but installations that are 3D, meaning floors and walls, in wet areas and dry areas, such as showers, become the most complex installation in your house. There are infinitely more ways to fail at every critical point than there are ways to achieve success. Education is paramount, as many installers are not even aware of what a successful installation is.
Lack of Adhesive Coverage
The industry specification for adhesive coverage is 80% for dry areas, and 95% for wet areas. Coverage refers to the amount of the body of the tile that adhesive transfers to from the substrate. How much it is connected. This photo shows a 4-1/4" square ceramic tile, with the only transfer being the small grey areas on the left and bottom of the tile. A complete failure.
Structures move, and so do finish material, due to expansion and contraction. With nearly no coverage, these tiles are subjected to dislodging from the installation, creating continual grout cracking, and in some cases, even falling off the wall.
Here is an in-depth article from the Ceramic Tile Education Foundation.
Spot Bonding
Another example of a lack of coverage is called Spot Bonding. Many installers use clumps of adhesive to try and tune the tiles to be in the same plane, so they look good on the outside, but they leave massive hollow voids, which allow water to collect, and do not provide support for each tile.
This is a faster, and cheaper way to appear like a professional installation, but it still is subject to excessive movement, and in the case of natural stones, it will shadow through the body and leave dark spots in the same shape as the blobs.
Here is an in-depth article from the Ceramic Tile Education Foundation.
Lippage
Lippage simply refers to the difference in finish height between two adjoining tiles.
There are many factors that contribute to this:
1) substrate preparation
2) adhesive coverage
3) quality, size, and shape of the tile
5) pattern choices
4) lack of attention to detail
It is important to understand that it is nearly impossible, and very impractical to aim to have hundreds or even thousands of tiles to be 100% flat. But there are acceptable tolerances. Generally speaking, a penny thickness or less is acceptable. But even this guideline has many variables, to include grout joint thickness. And in many situations, lippage can be mitigated to even less than this.
Here is an in-depth article from the Ceramic Tile Education Foundation.
Incorrect Substrates
Propper preparation is more criticial to a durable, life-long tile installation, than the look of the finished tile work.
In this example, someone installed ceramic tile directly over linolium. Look in the top left, and you can see a broken piece of tile with white adhesive all over it, but very little of that transferred and actually stuck to the linoleum. Grout was missing in many areas of this floor, due to excessive movement. Because vinyl and linoleum is installed over 1/2" of particle board, stapled to the plywood subfloor. There must be direct bond, with full coverage, to the structure (the subfloor).
Incorrect Waterproofing
This image comes from the same installation. The toilet flange originally installed to meet the depth of the 1/2" particle board and linoleum was not replaced, and raised, when the 3/8" ceramic tile was installed directly to the linoleum. Raising the threshold in the door above the existing, and creating an ugly step up, and it caused an air gap between the base of the toilet to the flange. This gap not only allows air from the waste to permeate the room, it leaks toilet sewage into the assembly. Completely disintegrated the actual structural plywood subfloor of the house around the flange, and rotting the area around it. In time, this gives way, and the toilet starts to sink in the floor, pitching the tiles around it, causing grout to come loose, and bacteria growth up through the grout.
Incorrect Drains
Another failure under incorrect waterproofing, is using incorrect drains and methods.
In the same installation, this "Water-in, water-out" shower pan method, described here, water is designed to drain through the top grate, but water that permeates the tile pan travels through a top coat of cement, and hits a river liner that is slopped, and makes its way to the middle of the drain neck, to enter the waste pipe through drain holes called "weep holes".
This cast iron commercial drain was designed to be put in large concrete floors floors that are not showers, and. does not have weep holes.
The first layer of concrete, called a "pre slope", was not slopped. Being flat, the water doesn't travel. In addition, the drain did not have weep holes, and they packed solid concrete around the drain, so even if it was slopped, and had weep holes, water couldn't get to the holes. Every ounce of water that permeated this shower pan, stayed in the assembly, and leaked into the subfloor and adjoining walls of this house.