Tiles slipping down the wall

[ChrisR]

Standard 25 x 40cm tiles, 8mm thick, 6mm equal notch spreader, held at about 45 degrees to the wall. I would prefer it to be thicker.
Wall is plaster skim with BAL tile primer.

I've pushed and bashed the tiles into the wall as hard as I can, which is pretty hard. Portrait style, they slip down about 1/8" every time.

Bal White Star premixed adhesive. It says "non slip". Rubbish! Are there any tile adhesives which do what it says on the pot?

I haven't done tiling for years. I used to use battens all the time but the effort of finding a straight bit of wood was enough to persuade me to put faith in this junk. So I've spent half an hour constantly pushing 3 tiles up to a line where it would be hard to use a batten.

Any suggestions? Nails?

--------

Now 15 mins later, and they're still slipping. One more go and if they keep slipping they'll have to come off.

"Dear BAL, your product is excrement... "

 

[gcol]

Nails?

Yup, that'd work.
Why can't you nail a short batton up though?
Gaffer tape is useful for holding tiles in place too.

I've never found a "non slip" adhesive that didn't slip yet.

 

[ChrisR]

I've never found a "non slip" adhesive that didn't slip yet.

Thanks, at least that makes me feel slightly less cheated!

Could use a batten but it would just be for one row of tiles in this case. Glad I decided to have a practice and not go plonking them all round the room. Now the search is on for straight pieces of wood!

Are the powdered adhesives better (Ardurit..)?

 

[Nestor_Kelebay]

Chris:

What I do is buy some straight wood MOLDING and fasten that to the wall around the tub enclosure first at the height I want my lowest grout line to be.

If your tiles are 16 inches tall, I'd suggest your molding be about 15 inches above the tub, but CHECK all four corners and the distance down to the floor (if you intend to tile down to the floor at the front and back) to ensure that spacing works out well. That way it LOOKS like the bottom row are full tiles, but they're actually cut to fit. If your tub is set level, you can maybe go to 15 1/2 or even 15 3/4 inches. In my building, the furthest out of leve I every had a tub was 3/4 of an inch from front to back. (Cutting the bottom row to fit down to the tub accomodates the tub no matter how far out of whack it is.)

Generally even softwood moldings (like fir) or even fingerjointed Aspen or spruce will be straight enough. If you can't find one straight as an arrow in cheap wood, spend a little bit more and get oak or some other hardwood which would have been well dried before being cut and shaped.

I use either screws or double sided mounting tape to fasten the wood to the wall.

Set your bottom course of tiles on the wood molding, and then after that those tiles will support the tiles above them. Do the very bottom row last.

That'll save you the bother of beating the s#&$ out of each tile you set (for all the good that would do anyway).

I use a thin set mortar to set wall tiles. I lay tiles out on the floor in two rows; one row end-to-end and another row side-to-side, with plastic grout spacers between the tiles in both rows. That way I can accurately measure the tiles on the floor to know where the tiling on the wall is gonna end up.
Then I'll mark off a rectange on the wall of 5 or 6 square feet in pencil and use 2 inch wide masking tape to tape off that area. Then I spread the thin set mortar on that area with my notched trowel, and the masking tape means I don't have to be careful near the edges. Then I pull off the masking tape and back butter each tile with fresh mortar as I set it. That way, even if the mortar on the wall skins over, the moisture from the fresh mortar on the back of the tile will re-activate it, and the tile will bond just like it had been set in fresh mortar.
I prefer using 6 inch X 8 inch tiles because that's the largest size you can comfortably hold in one hand so that you can back-butter it with the other hand.

Don't make the mistake of sticking your tile spacers flat against the wall with the intention of grouting over them. Stick them between the tiles perpendicular to the wall so that you can pull them out after the tile adhesive sets up.

I like using thin set mortar to set the tiles. If you use thin set, after the tiling is all done, then fold a piece of sandpaper in half and run that through the grout joints to remove any thin set that may have squeezed up between the tiles.

 

[gcol]

ChrisR,
To be honest, I've never used powdered adhesive for wall tiling. I use it for floor tiling all the time but for wall tiling I think it'd be going off too quickly to use unless it was on a wide expanse of wall where you could just chuck a load of tiles at it in one go. Most of the jobs I do are small fidly ones and I reckon I'd be throwing more adhesive away than I'd use with powdered. I don't see any real advantage in using powdered for walls.

On Nestor's point, I only ever screw battens to the wall where the wall is already tiled. Otherwise just bang oval nails though battens into the plaster. Must admit the self adhesive might be handy on already tiled walls though.

Also I never butter the back of tiles unless it's easier to do that than spread it on the walls.

Out of interest, what did the BAL cost you per tub? I use Dunlop for about £7 a tub at the minute.


Nestor,
what exactly is thinset? I've heard you mention the term before but I'm not quite sure of the equivalent over here? Is that premixed or powdered?

 

[Nestor_Kelebay]

Gcol:

"Thinset mortar" is powdered cement based mortar used to set EITHER wall or floor tiles.

It's a dark cementatious powder similar to brick mortar, but doesn't have nearly as much sand in it as regular brick mortar does. (And, I expect the sand it does have in it is pulverized so ithe mortar has a smoother texture, rather than being coarse like brick mortar.) Also, it doesn't dry as hard as regular cement based brick mortars do.

Over here, people refer to setting tiles with either "thin set" or "mastic", and I expect that probably corresponds to "powder" and "premix" respectively.

Also, we refer to "thin set" to mean any powdered mortar for setting ceramic tiles.
"Dry set" mortars are thin set mortars that don't have any polymer added to them in powder form to increase their adhesion, flexibility and hardness. Such mortars will normally have a liquid additive sold separately to be used with this mortar.
"Polymer modified thin sets" are tile setting mortars that have had powdered additives added to them so that when you mix them with water, you end up with much the same thing as if you'd added a liquid additive when mixing up a dry set mortar.

Generally, we use thin sets for setting floor tiles and mastics for setting wall tiles. However, I prefer to set my wall tiles with thin set because the thicker bed under the tile allows for better accomodation of any "unflatness" of the wall. Also, one of the reasons I like to use DRY SET mortar WITHOUT any additive in it to set my wall tiles is that the resulting mortar is plenty strong enough to hold the tiles on in anything under a Reichter 12 earthquake, but soft enough that I can remove the stuff fairly quickly and easily from the wall with a tungsten carbide bladed paint scraper. That way, I can retile a bathroom quickly and easily if a tenant decides they want to take up photography and drill a bunch of holes in my ceramic tiling to hang their negatives while they dry. You CAN remove mastic with a heat gun, but it's not as easy as scraping down a dry set.

(I've never tried to scrape down a polymer modified thin set with a paint scraper, but I'm betting it would be much like fighting with a grizzly bear.)

http://www.laticrete.com/Pages/thinsetrsht.htm

 

[gcol]

Gotcha thanks

 

[paulbrown]

I haven't done tiling for years. I used to use battens all the time but the effort of finding a straight bit of wood was enough to persuade me to put faith in this junk. So I've spent half an hour constantly pushing 3 tiles up to a line where it would be hard to use a batten.
"

Instead of using wooden battons I use 150mm contiplas, dirt cheap, perfectly straight and easily wiped clean and reused. The depth of the board means no sagging and less fixings too.

 

[Softus]

Now the search is on for straight pieces of wood!

Chris, the wood doesn't have to be very straight - all you need is a variety of spacers placed underneath the bottom row to get your line right.

Nailing works, but it's too much like hard work.

The spacers can be anything you like - bits of card, toilet roll tube, 15mm copper cut off and flattened, or proper tile spacers.

A long spirit level is vital, or a laser level if you have one.