Shower Wall Tile Cracking

Occasionally a crack along the joint between grout and tile appears to be a crack in the tile s surface.

Shower wall tile cracking.

A tile expert michael byrne responds. Fill the hole or crack as best you can. In far more instances the crack was caused by anomalies under or around the tile. In other cases a mastic type of adhesive was used instead of thinset and this can cause the tiles to not adhere the the shower walls and crack.

Sometimes water has gotten behind your shower causing the shower walls to swell causing cracks in the tiles. Simply put because of movement. Loss of bond or moving substrate. Your shower wall tiles might have cracked due to one of the following reasons outlined below.

Small hairline cracks in ceramic tile showers do not typically allow water to get through. What could be causing the cracking. Low quality tiles the type and quality of tiles used for your bathroom wall are. Once you removed it make use of a fine grit sandpaper to brush against it and make it smoother.

It doesn t appear that there has been any movement in the floor or the walls. Tiles generally crack for only two reasons. Use a putty knife to apply it to the crack in the tile. To fix the crack you have a couple of options.

Once the material has hardened trim the excess with a sharp object such as a razor blade. Cracked bathroom tiles can be caused by either an instability in the surface under the tile or in rare cases the low quality of the tile itself. There is a ceramic soap dish in the corner and even it is cracked. In this case the substrate might be moving if the studs are spaced farther apart than 16 inches on center allowing that backerboard to flex.

If your tile s crack seems to run along the tile s outer edge closely inspect the crack to determine if it s really on the tile or just through the grout. According to the tile council of north america anywhere a tile surface changes plane like an interior corner or meets an abutting surface against a wall or hardwood floor for example should be considered a movement joint. Why does grout crack in the corners of showers backsplashes and against abutting surfaces. Hairline cracks in tile may result from remote obscure reasons such as improperly cured concrete or flexing underlayments and joists.

In many cases the crack is not the result of an inferior tile. Not properly fixed an improper fixing method is one of the main reasons why shower wall tiles crack. There are many reasons why shower tiles can crack and break.