Loose floor tile.

[grommett]

I had my kitchen floor tiled about a year ago. My builder first made good a couple of areas of the wooden floor and then fixed 12mm waterproof ply over the top. Then the tiler laid electric underfloor heating and latex leveling over the top before tiling. He laid 600 x 600 glazed porcelain using 2 part flexible adhesive.

I have now found a tile is flexing in one corner whan you stand on it. The rest of the tile is solid apart from one corner.

Can anyone tell me if there is a way of fixing this tile without removing it? I have no spares and the tile shop is no longer in business. The room is 42 square meters and now has a kitchen installed so I obviously dont want to redo the whole thing!

Here's hopefully

Cheers

 

[Richard C]

If you don’t want to remove the tile (& I can understand that if you don’t have any spares) you could try raking out the grout (hopefully you have a wide joint) around the offending corner & injecting a thin mix adhesive in the hope it will find it’s way under the corner of the tile but you may have limited success with anything water based; a non water based epoxy adhesive may be better or even a thin mix epoxy grout but I’ve never tried it.

A solid thick bed adhesive bed is a must under floor tiles & if a large format trowel had been used, this should not have happened; I’d be a little concerned that the tiler has skimped on the adhesive bed & you may have a recurring problem. Additionally, in a heavy use/load area such as a kitchen, I personally would have used the adhesive manufacturers & BS recommended minimum of 15mm WBP for over boarding or replaced the floor entirely with 25mm WBP. Even though it’s been a year I would still contact your builder in the first instance to see what he's got to say about it. Manufacturers of quality trade products give a product warranty of up to 25 years in some cases but are unlikely to honor it where the installation instructions haven’t been followed.