Wet Rooms
Protect your bathroom from water worries with HardieBacker® tile backer board.
Moisture sensitive areas like bathrooms or kitchens are particularly prone to the negative influence of water on tile backer boards. Whereas traditional materials such as plywood and plasterboard are liable to break or disintegrate when wet, have confidence that your job will last with a board in fibre cement that stays strong and firm, no matter how damp it gets. Get the best protection against moisture damage when you use HardieBacker® tile backer board. It’s the floor tiling backer-board of choice wherever superior performance is required.
With its unique cement formulation, HardieBacker board has no loose aggregates or fillers, making it the strongest, most uniform composition.
Which material is right for you? Plasterboard, plywood or fibre cement.
Once your dream bathroom is complete, there’s nothing better than sinking back into a hot bubble bath and relaxing after all the hard work. As a homeowner, the one thing you don’t want to contemplate is having costly remedial works should things go wrong.
Whilst it’s one of the last things you want to think about, there are a few simple precautions homeowners can take prior to installation to ensure no contractor call backs. Remember, where water damage is concerned, it is what’s hidden behind your tiles that makes all the difference.
When it comes to protection from water, traditional building materials have never performed well. Where builders or tilers would once have opted for simple plasterboard or plywood, contemporary performance tile backer boards offer a breadth of benefits over these materials, ensuring that your bathroom remains in perfect condition for decades to come.
It is for this reason that the new British Standard for the tiling industry, British Standard 5385-1, now advises against using plywood as background material for the direct fixing of ceramic wall and natural stone tiles.
Why use a performance board?
There are many reasons to opt for using performance boards as the tile backer board of choice for your project:
Tile hanging weights
Current design trends for tiles are moving towards larger format or heavier premium tiling materials such as porcelain or natural stone. The higher the hanging weight, the more support is needed behind the tile to ensure dimensional stability with no slippage.
Standard plasterboard or plywood hold up to 30kg per m2, whereas HardieBacker® tile backer-board is the strongest substrate on the market; offering up to 200 kg per m2 of tile hanging weight, more than double the tile hanging strength of any competitive product.
In real terms, this means that when you choose HardieBacker® board, you can use any tile finish you like: from ceramic, travertine, porcelain and slate to marble, granite, onyx and quartzite. If it’s a tile available on the UK market, you can use it, no matter the material or size.
Avoiding damage
HardieBacker® tile backer-board contains no paper facing, which you would find with plasterboard. a food source for mould which causes unsightly damage.
Preventing cracked tiles & grout
The primary cause of cracked tiles and grout is due to water damage of the substrate.
Plasterboard and plywood are neither water resistant nor waterproof, offering no protection against water penetration. Once water ingress occurs, the gypsum core of plasterboard rots and disintegrates, eventually causing tiles to become unstuck. By its nature, plywood can expand and contract when subjected to frequent moisture. This can lead to cracks appearing in tiles or grout lines, and often replacement is the only solution.
In contrast, the HardieBacker® board is an engineered tile backer-board made from cement and special chemical additives, which allows for proper bonding of the board and tile. It does not rot, swell, warp or de-laminate like plywood even in the wettest conditions.
Using a standard building material like plasterboard or plywood might seem like a cost-effective solution, but in the long term, it is a false economy. The smartest and simplest way to protect your bathroom is to ensure the correct preparation has been undertaken prior to final installation. Using HardieBacker® fibre cement tile backer-board comes down to this: do it once, do it right.
Buy our HardieBacker board online or call the branch and speak to one of our sales team
Tel: 01482 830870