Cracking tiles, worried about movement?

[3amgoogle]

We moved into a renovated house a few years ago. Shortly after moving we found a hairline crack in our kitchen tiling which has grown. There are 3 cracks in one tile and some cracks to grouting and hairline cracks in the area. It's a concrete subfloor.

The rest of the kitchen is fine.

Would anyone be able to give a nod to if we replaced the cracked tile if this would happen again? Should we be worried about movement/subsidence? I can't see any cracks to the walls, although admittedly our mortar is in bad shape generally.

I'm no expert sorry. But did you have a survey prior to purchase, were any issues raised about movement?

You might want to get a surveyor in now, it'll not cost that much.

Hard to say - porcelain tiles can be quite vulnerable to cracks for all sorts of reasons. In the absence of other cracks I would put this down to things like thermal change, not having flexible adhesive, or not a level subfloor/too much adhesive. If the cracks are caused by movement then you might expect to see other cracks diagonally opposite, high up on wall/ceiling, or around the corners of doors/windows.

I’d probably have it checked. Is the room on ground level? (I mean actually at outside ground level, not on the ground floor of the house). In our old house the house was on a small slope, so there were 3 steps down to the back garden. When we did the kitchen the builder discovered the concrete slab had been built on basically rubbish, and said that if we’d put in the island we wanted it’d have collapsed into the void within a few years. We had to spent a chunk of money on having it all dug out and repoured.

Survey said some indication of movement but within normal limits, or something like that

@Autumnally

Hard to say - porcelain tiles can be quite vulnerable to cracks for all sorts of reasons. In the absence of other cracks I would put this down to things like thermal change, not having flexible adhesive, or not a level subfloor/too much adhesive. If the cracks are caused by movement then you might expect to see other cracks diagonally opposite, high up on wall/ceiling, or around the corners of doors/windows.

Agree with this: keep your eye on how things develop over the next 1 year. It’s diagonal cracks that are a bit of a giveaway of movement (ones that follow vertical/horizontal lines are often thermal cracks where 2 materials join, the cracks caused by heating & cooling at different rates)

It might be the prep/ subfloor, rather than something structural. We had a similar thing happen in a bathroom after it was re-done and it was because the subfloor was prepared incorrectly. It would definitely be worth getting someone to look at it though.

We had this and the tile fitter hadn’t used a flexible under thing (no clue re technical term but I think it was the type of glue).

Do you know what's under the tiles? It may be that the recent refurb was done with a view to selling (ie cutting some corners) and the sub floor should have had work done to it prior to tiling.

Is this not diagonial across the tile?

Are the cracks on floor tiles? Maybe the floor isn’t completely level.

@FolornLawn

Do you know what's under the tiles? It may be that the recent refurb was done with a view to selling (ie cutting some corners) and the sub floor should have had work done to it prior to tiling.

It's concrete, so possibly, other bits of refurb work appear to have cut corners so this would make sense.

It's also on the end of the kitchen near some french doors, so might be more exposed to heat/cold?

Starting to think I should keep an eye and replace within a year. If it was subsidence my walls would be cracking too?

I don't know about subsidence, but I had some floor tiling done recently and we needs lots of prep work done to the floor. Does the floor move if you jump up and down on it? I'm wondering whether it's concrete throughout or whether that bit could have a suspended or floating floor underneath it. Or maybe the screed wasn't properly flat.

I've a few cracked Tiles in my Kitchen. The reason their cracked is because the so called Tiler that but them down didn't use enough adhesive. There is a hallow sound when I tap them.

We had a fair few crack in our kitchen. Turns out the tiling was a complete bodge job, there were huge hollow areas under the tiles, which were each stuck on with a one or two massive blobs of adhesive