G
gpd
I have a fair bit of tiling experience: the bathroom floor and walls tiled (over a year ago, and have had no problems), and the kitchen walls tiled and part of its floor (more recently)... but I haven't had this happen yet.
I'm using BAL's excellent adhesive range, and have followed their fixing guide. However, the remaining parts of flooring to be tiled are concrete and I'm not using BAL's recommended adhesive for concrete floors. I'm using their "ctf4" and have several bags, so I would rather not purchase a different adhesive.
Basically what has happened is the adhesive didn't adhere properly to the first tiles that I started laying. The ones that I started laying were from two different mixes. I do think the first mix was too dry and almost all those tiles eventually showed themselves to have loose areas the next day, and I took almost all of them up. At a later point I ended up pulling up the rest because I could tell they were also fairly loose. With the ease that they came up, I know leaving them down would have caused problems with movement later. Most but not all of the adhesive stayed stuck to the floor rather than the tiles, although has since started coming loose from the concrete floor as well (I haven't scraped it all up yet).
I'm just glad I'd only laid a small part of the remaining floor before the problem showed itself.
I have two possible solutions in mind, other than making sure the mix isn't too dry, but wanted to get advice from those with more experience. Firstly, I didn't prime the concrete floor and I'm wondering if this has allowed the concrete to suck all of the moisture out of the adhesive, causing it to be too dry to properly adhere to the tiles (and to a lesser degree, adhere to the concrete), and would the acrylic primer seal the concrete and thus prevent the absorption and solve the problem? Secondly, I considered whether I need to put an additive into the mix with this specific adhesive in order to use it on a concrete floor?
I'm using BAL's excellent adhesive range, and have followed their fixing guide. However, the remaining parts of flooring to be tiled are concrete and I'm not using BAL's recommended adhesive for concrete floors. I'm using their "ctf4" and have several bags, so I would rather not purchase a different adhesive.
Basically what has happened is the adhesive didn't adhere properly to the first tiles that I started laying. The ones that I started laying were from two different mixes. I do think the first mix was too dry and almost all those tiles eventually showed themselves to have loose areas the next day, and I took almost all of them up. At a later point I ended up pulling up the rest because I could tell they were also fairly loose. With the ease that they came up, I know leaving them down would have caused problems with movement later. Most but not all of the adhesive stayed stuck to the floor rather than the tiles, although has since started coming loose from the concrete floor as well (I haven't scraped it all up yet).
I'm just glad I'd only laid a small part of the remaining floor before the problem showed itself.
I have two possible solutions in mind, other than making sure the mix isn't too dry, but wanted to get advice from those with more experience. Firstly, I didn't prime the concrete floor and I'm wondering if this has allowed the concrete to suck all of the moisture out of the adhesive, causing it to be too dry to properly adhere to the tiles (and to a lesser degree, adhere to the concrete), and would the acrylic primer seal the concrete and thus prevent the absorption and solve the problem? Secondly, I considered whether I need to put an additive into the mix with this specific adhesive in order to use it on a concrete floor?
