Tuesday 6 August 2013

What causes stone floors to crack

What causes stone floors to crack?
Stone floors normally crack when the subfloor moves, this can be caused by hot pipes running under the stone floor. The customer had lifted part of the tile to see what was causing the damage.
What causes cracked tiles?
In this case the customer wanted us to carry out the work straight away, so we filled the gap with 2 part stone repair filler and cleaned and polished.
We would normally advise against this course of action as the filler will probably fall out after several months, but this customer wanted to take the risk. We also advised that we needed to fit an expansion joints (see photo), so that it could absorb the movement in the floor, rather than it cracking. In order to do this we had to replace a tile to lay the expansion joint.
If you have a stone floor which is starting to crack you will need to do so straight way to avoid the whole floor from potentially cracking.