Concrete pad residence size

[Charlie]

Under what circumstance would a builder use an expansion strip in the concrete pad through the middle of a house? Reason for the question is I have floor tile coming loose over and around a joint and this could be the cause of it, The house is about 7 years old. TIA

[SQLit]

There are a ton of reasons for a control/expansion joint in concrete. Pretty rare around where I live for residential construction.

With out more information and inspection all that I could provide is more questions

Could be a bad install job.

[DanG]

The normal problem is that residential floors typically have no joints or expansion. Concrete cannot much larger than 144 sq ft without cracking. Under carpet this is not a problem. As long as the cracks are random and don't suffer from differential settlement, they go unnoticed. You never indicated what type of tile, I assume ceramic or stone. What often happens, the floor man uses some floor stone over the crack and installs the tile. When the floor moves, it can pop the floor stone loose. It costs more money to do it right. Ceramic should have an isolation sheet over cracks to try to keep them from transferring into the finish tile, but even here there are no guarantees. The best approach would be to install a joint in the finish tile directly over the concrete crack. This usually does not work well because the random crack in the slab is not true and people don't want a wandering joint in the finish tile.

You will find a great deal of good, sound, technical information here:

Especially read the section about "kitchen floors" even if yours is not in the kitchen.

(top posted for your convenience) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Keep the whole world singing . . . . DanG (remove the sevens) [e-mail]