- What kind of sealant are you specifying in your tile soft joints? The TCA handbook recommends urethane, polysulfide, or silicone sealants. Grout manufacturers provide sealants that match their grout, both sanded and unsanded, which all appear to be acrylic. Or have you avoided the issue by specifying pre-formed soft joints such as Schluter Dilex.
- TCA also requires that the joints be located and detailed on the drawings. Is anyone meeting resistance from their designers? How are you “encouraging” their cooperation?
Beth:
you can avoid some of the tile soft joints by using latex modified setting bed and grout. In a typical toilet room, you probably won’t need them.
in a faciity large enough to need such joints, I use silicone, and sand it if its in the floor. I don’t consider polysulfide to be worth the money (5-8 year life) and urethane isn’t much better. we don’t use the preformed joints; not for any reason that I’m aware of; it just hasn’t come up.
We work out ‘soft’ joints on tile layout (shop) drawings. (The hard joints are reviewed prior to concrete pours). Almost all of our work is specified as latex modified thinset, and latex modified grout as per Anne’s remarks. Our ‘soft’ joints are sealant products. We have not used preformed material.
The biggest problem we have is coordinating the hard joints. Usually these don’t get coordinated far enough in advance because the tile guys never get involved. So, the tile guys work around whatever happens. We’ve tried to coordinate the hard joints with the tile design on the drawings, but usually something goes amiss. This requires a real craftsman’s/craftperson’s eye for detail, and a commitment that doesn’t exist on our projects.
Doug, I think you have a typo in your last sentence. The last word should be “budgets”, not “projects”
That’s pretty funny because we’re preparing a cost estimate for a project that was: $14M in Feb 2004, then $19M in Nov 2004, and $24M in Jan 2006.
So, we’re not using tile anymore - we’ll just put newspapers down on the floor.
I agree with the other post, except I specify mildew resistant silicone for soft joints
Schluter Systems has nonelastomeric sealant control and expansion joint accessories.