New porcelain tile chipping already, and darker underneath?

11 years ago

We just had porcelain tile with a PEI rating of 4 installed professionally. Last weekend, we had a steam cleaner from Lowe's in our house so we could steam clean our carpets. We were moving the steam cleaner, and it caught the corner of two of our tiles and chipped them both.

Honestly, it wasn't much force. I know tile can chip, but I thought a 4 PEI was supposed to be stronger than this. Also, it's porcelain, and I thought the advantage is that porcelain is the same color all the way through, so chips are not as noticeable. This tile is light beige and it looks like dark grey underneath it.

This is very disappointing. We had cheap builder grade ceramic in our house in the same area for 10 years and had one little chip because we dropped something on it.

Is this typical? I wonder if we got a bad batch of tile.

Comments (4)

nerdyshopper
11 years ago
I don't know what you have, but every porcelain tile that I saw when we were looking for some to do the washroom floor was hard as rock and about the same all the way through. What you describe is more like the cheap ceramic tiles we saw. Not acutally gery and black but different clay from the top.
GreenDesigns
11 years ago
Only colorbody porcelain is the same color all the way through. All other porcelain has a colored glaze on top. PEI rating has to do with abrasion resistance of the surface, not any more inherent "strength" in the tile. ANY tile will snap if you yank on an exposed edge at an angle. Tile is supposed to be installed flat, with no edges higher than the others. One edge higher than the other is called lippage, and it's due to an incorrect install. You should address the issue with your installer, but if he was unable to install this correctly, it's unlikely that he will be willing to rip it out and redo it correctly. In fact, he may not be able to do it correctly if he didn't do it right the first time.
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Floortech
11 years ago
I believe too much grout may have been removed. Cheap junk is harder than that if it is installed correctly!
jerseygirl07067
Original Author
11 years ago
After doing some more research, I am guessing we have glazed porcelain and not through body. I feel rather dumb, since we researched this and chose porcelain, not realizing there are two types. We bought the tile and had it professionally installed. I'm surprised he didn't say something to us when he was cutting it, since it would have been obvious that the top was a different color.

I responded with this to my other related thread:

Thanks for the info. The install was over a concrete slab. It was rectified tile too. I did check the lippage and it is definitely not 1/8" out of level. It's probably between 1/16 and 1/8 in the worst spots. Most others are much less than that when I actually measured. . I didn't expect it to be such a small difference, but the small grout times make it more obvious.

We will try to regrout some of the areas and see if that helps. Our installer is going to come back to fix something else related to a different job. There is one area of lippage that's right near our refrigerator that's probably the worst one again, between 1/16 and 1/8. We may have him redo that one since it's in a very noticeable area.

Maybe we should have gone with a slightly larger grout line. Well, what's done is done. Honestly it still looks nice though, I just wanted to make sure I'm not being too picky