Spacers essential for tiling?

Kill_Phil

Kill_Phil

Kill_Phil

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Joined
11 Feb 2010
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England
Tiling the front porch using some victorian tiles.

The pictures online butt up the tiles and I've seen one installation where they also don't use spacers.

Using spacers (so bigger gap for grout) will ruin flow of the solid border so I guess the question is grout essential?

Found some 1mm spaces which may help...
 
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I have never ever seen tiling without grout, make of that what you will.

If this was to see any water at all I'd suggest the grout ensures water tightness.
 
LuckyBenski said:
If this was to see any water at all I'd suggest the grout ensures water tightness.
Click to expand...
It's not so much the water as what little soaks into the grout evaporates, grout gets wet and then dries, it's the movement in the tiles that the grout compensates for.

Everything expands/contracts with heat/cold and while each tile may only change by 0.3mm when you add those up it can be enough to pop/crack tiles, smaller tiles are less effected because the ratio of tiles to grout is lower.

You can tile without grout and less than the standard 3mm but to do so you need to understand the properties of what you're working with, by how much each tile will expand/contract by in the environment it's being used in and how much area it's going to cover. The PITA involved in doing that is why a catch all standard of 3mm.
 
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