Had two jobs this/last week involving grouting wall tiles, one where I have tiled a wall and one where I raked out the old grout on existing tiles.
It's been really hot & humid in sunny Medway this/last week and both bathrooms have been short on the ventilation front.
In both cases I've noticed that the grout in small areas has dried with small 'pinholes' in it.
The newly tiled wall should have been dry, tiled on Saturday, grouted Monday. The raked out grouted wall showed the same symptoms.
Used a proper grout float on both walls, proper grout finisher, different make of adhesive/grout in each case, both newly purchased. Not seem this before.
Is it the humidity & temperature that causes this? PITA as I had to regrout in both cases to get a good finish.
BTW is there actually any difference between a 'grouting sponge' and a 'sponge' - apart from the price? I cant see any.
If you are referring to the scouring sponges, 'grouting sponge' doesn't have any colouring in it to rub off on the grout. If you use a green one for the kitchen pans with white grout, you can find green staining appear in the grout surface. Yes, leave something out and charge 10 times the price...
Why would anyone use a pan scourer ..even the spongy type to grout tiles with . As far as I can tell a grouting sponge is much the same as any other sponge ...(some may be slightly softer than others .) other than a natural sponge of course but they are prohibited are they not .
I've just completed a tiling job using large format (305mm sq.) limestone tiles. I went to a lot of trouble contacting the major adhesives manufacturers and talking to their technical departments. Probably the two significant ones in terms of coverage of applications are Ardex and Weber (used to be Howtex).
Ardex were especially helpful in terms of choice of fixing system and procedures to use and their web site has a lot of useful information for different applications. I was especially concerned about fixing to different surfaces - in the same room there are plasterboard, ply, plaster. Ideally, one should use a different fixing and sometimes grouting approach for each of these (can be more if it will be a wet area), but I wasn't going to buy three different sets of materials - especially when each comes in minimum of 11kg bags. Equally, the premixed materials that are sold under some of the manufacturer's other brand labels such as Dunlop are not well suited to the applications I had.
Ardex came up with a solution that could be made to cover the entire requirement of fixing and grouting by choice of commercial adhesive, admix and primer and then grout and admix for that part. It also ended up being the least expensive approach to the complete job. A primer was used for the plywood to assist bonding to that. The admix for the adhesive both makes it flexible but also extends working time. The same was true for the grout. Professional tilers often use faster setting adhesives because they can work faster or have an assistant doing part of the work. Often there is a requirement to walk on the tiles fairly soon after laying.
For the occasional tiler, they told me that short open time can be risky and that especially in warm conditions can waste a lot of material because the adhesive has gone off too quickly. Crucially, for grout, the suggestion was to use a slower setting one and also to seal the tiles after fixing but before grouting using Lithofin MN Stainstop. For stone tiles, especially softer ones like limestone, this is critical to avoid staining, but also significantly reduces absorption of water. I was warned that rapid drying causes pin holes and potential cracking, as does mixing to the wrong consistency. I wonder whether ceramic tiles absorb water through the sides of the tile.
Regarding the grout mixing, it was recommended to proceed slowly and after the initial addition of powder to water and the first stirring, to allow the adhesive to slake for a few minutes and then stir again, adjusting consistency if needed.
I also bought a couple of books. Considering the investment in the materials and time, I thought that that would be a worthwhile investment. Of these, the best I found was one called Setting Tile by Michael Byrne. It's a U.S. book, which results in measurements being in imperial, which is unfortunate, but the techniques, materials and content are generic. He gives a large number of hints, tips and methods that come from his own experiences. For £11.50, it's a good buy.
Well exactly. There were quite a few cuts, and of course the tile circular saw has proper metric scales.
While I think of it, I also bought some tile layout software - Precision Tile from another U.S. source, Laurel Creek Software.
My objective was to do some trial layouts which are important anyway but especially where large format tiles are used. Initially I had thought of using Autosketch or Google's thing or even bits of graph paper, but it seemed like a lot of work.
Then I happened on Precision Tile and looked in detail through the web site
formatting link
seemed to do what I wanted in terms of being a simple to use, application specific CAD program that allows visualisations and more importantly, allows quick changes to be made. In effect, it's like a simpler version of some of the kitchen design packages.
Normally I like to have download evaluations of software before buying, and this does have the disadvantage of only running on Windows rather than an operating system, but at $24.95 with electronic delivery (about £13), in the context of an investment of a few hundred £ in tiles and materials it seemed reasonable.
The results are excellent. I can run it in a Parallels or VMWare environment and it does what the author describes. I was able to produce basic layouts for the room in well under an hour by inputting tile dimensions and grout widths and then simply drawing the walls. The tiles can then be overlaid and moved around in different trial layouts. At one point, I considered adding in bands of small mosaics towards the corners of two of the walls, but this not only didn't look right visually, but wouldn't have fitted correctly.
A more difficult problem was the vertical positioning of the tiles. There were three options for this, being
- to split the cuts equally at top and bottom of the tiling
- to split the space equally between the top of the tiling and a length of granite used for the basin
- to split the space equally between the underside of a cupboard and the top of a different piece of granite used to make a top for the cistern enclosure.
This was debated long and hard. The technically correct solution is the first one, but it does not produce a good visual appearance around the focal point when walking into the room, which is the basin and granite counter on which it sits. As a result, I went for the second option, which is somewhat better than the third with both looking better than the first.
I did also mock up bits of the layout in the room with old sample tiles that I scrounged from the supplier.
It was certainly worth spending the time on trying out the layouts and coincidentally saved on cuts and material used - the software gives an indication of how many tiles will be needed.
In my experience an 'ordinary' sponge won't last the job but a grouting sponge will outlast it. (My 'ordinary' one was part of a free car cleaning kit. It was in shreads in no time. The proper one that I got finished the fully tiled bathroom and is still fit for use, no sign of shredding.)
What was up with "I was warned that rapid drying causes pin holes and potential cracking, as does mixing to the wrong consistency" instead of adding all the pretentious waffle? The OP only wanted to know if humidity & temperature causes pinholes not your life story.
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