Shower Wall Tile Cracking

To fix the crack you have a couple of options.

Shower wall tile cracking.

Loss of bond or moving substrate. In far more instances the crack was caused by anomalies under or around the tile. Fill the hole or crack as best you can. You can repair the crack with tile filler and then paint over the filler with a color that matches the rest of the tile.

Hairline cracks in tile may result from remote obscure reasons such as improperly cured concrete or flexing underlayments and joists. Once you removed it make use of a fine grit sandpaper to brush against it and make it smoother. Small hairline cracks in ceramic tile showers do not typically allow water to get through. Low quality tiles the type and quality of tiles used for your bathroom wall are.

Sometimes water has gotten behind your shower causing the shower walls to swell causing cracks in the tiles. Broken or cracked shower tiles can allow water and mold to get in your shower walls so they should be replaced or repaired immediately. What could be causing the cracking. 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.

There is a ceramic soap dish in the corner and even it is cracked. 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. Your shower wall tiles might have cracked due to one of the following reasons outlined below. 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.

Simply put because of movement. 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. 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.

Once the material has hardened trim the excess with a sharp object such as a razor blade. Use a putty knife to apply it to the crack in the tile. It doesn t appear that there has been any movement in the floor or the walls. You can replace the entire tile.

In many cases the crack is not the result of an inferior tile. A tile expert michael byrne responds. Tiles generally crack for only two reasons.