Spacers essential for tiling?

Kill_Phil

Kill_Phil

Kill_Phil

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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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LuckyBenski said:
If this was to see any water at all I'd suggest the grout ensures water tightness.
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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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MassiveJim said:
but they do have gaps, they're just very small gaps
the article even says "The whole floor was then re-grouted and cleaned off to ensure a good match"
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You can see the grout lines in the pictures! I wouldn’t tile without grout seems like a recipe for disaster to me!
 
You'll certainly need something inbetween the tile to maintain total rigidity and protect against the heat expansion and cold shrinkage..
 
Kill_Phil said:
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...
Click to expand...

The size of the gap you need is down to how accurately the tiles are made. You should use the standard size spacers and no smaller.

The tiles with built in spacers are a little difficult because the "built in spacer" can get damaged and was usually just not very precise. You are better ignoring that and using bought spacers, but you need to set them away from the corners, so you need four for each corner, with just one arm of the spacer poked in to the gap about 20mm from the corner.

1mm spacers are usually way too small for most tiles. Only Rectified tiles should be used with very small spacers. These are tiles that are machined to a very specific size.
 
If done with the right grout match etc, it can be pretty unoticable, but I wouldn't do it without. As other have said, expansion/contraction could cause issues, but also, if your floor isn't solid & has any movement, this would also likely crack tiles without a suitable grout gap.
 
Before the invention of tile spacers in the 1950s, professional tile installers used to use nails, screws, ropes, and sticks to keep the tiles equidistant from each other.

if you dont the tiles could crack from expansion apparently, the gap probably has to be tiny, I doubt tiles expand much in the summer
 
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