slow drying floor cement

I have just used some `quick` dry flexible floor cement, Its been put on ply for floor tiles. I noticed the morning after that the bucket that had some left in it was still soft, so checked the gaps between the floor tiles and it wasnt quite hard. it has now hardened and hopefully ok now, but I am talking 36 hours to achieve this. The room temp was about 65F and I mixed roughly 1:4 as per instruction, although didnt measure accurately, but the mix seemed ok. (I have used before)

Any idea as to what may have caused this?

thanks

Reply to
S S
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I was waiting for somebody more qualified to help you out and thought to learn a thing or two on cement but as there are no takers I'll unlurk for a change :-) The mixture you used seems fine to me but from my own hard learned experience I know that

1) time to harden out changes depending on the season (temperature, humidity and air flow) I like it when it's about 77F with a steady breeze and no humidity to speak of. 2) time also changes drastically depending on the surface. If I need to put cement directly on ply (wood) I usually first use some kind of sheeting to avoid too rapid absorption (which should have happened in your case if I understand it correctly but didn't. So, this doesn't explain your problem, I think). 3) the worst batch of cement I ever made was when I used leftovers dated 3 years back. At the time I reasoned that since I had stored it protected from damp/ moisture it would be Ok, .....not! It didn't harden well and when it finally did it was brittle and no good for anything, I had to redo the whole job from scratch :( I guess that 3 is what could explain your problem (but I hope for you it was just high humidity)

cheers

pieter

(average amateur :-)

S S wrote:

Reply to
pieter mioch

Thanks for your slant on the cement issue, its does seem to have cured ok, although still cant quite work out why it took so long to set. I have an inkling that it might be a `bad` batch as I have done 3 cement jobs in 2 months from 2 lots of cement and only the cement from one of the bags had this problem. It was freshly purchased cement so not stored for long at my end.

regards

Reply to
S S

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