Video: Outdoor Porcelain Tile

SAN JOSE — Roger Van Alst: Lately, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about porcelain outdoor tile. A few years ago the porcelain tile companies decided to produce a product that’s built specifically for the outdoor environment. It’s still porcelain tile but it’s still two centimeters thick as opposed to the thinner tiles you have for the indoor environment. It’s made non-slip, wet or dry, so it’s completely safe for the outdoor environment. It gives a beautiful contemporary or modern look to the outdoor environment. But there’s definitely some special considerations to think about when considering this product for your outdoor environment as opposed to a concrete paving stone or even other natural stones in the outdoor environment.

First of all, there are some distinct benefits to this. It is made of porcelain, and as you may know from indoor porcelain tile, porcelain is virtually indestructible. You could pressure wash this for three days straight and you wouldn’t lose one bit of any of the surface off of that porcelain material. So, it’s extremely tough. It’s also very beautiful. They’ve simulated wood in this particular piece of porcelain tile, but they also have different stone finishes that you can choose from, and they’ve come up with a screen printing technique that makes it absolutely stunning in the outdoor environment. There’s a few different ways that you might install this product. One is you could inlay it on concrete. If you have a porch or a patio that’s made with concrete, you do want to make sure that concrete has no cracks in it or any areas that might separate or move, because if that underlayment moves and shifts, the concrete will cause the porcelain tile to crack right along with it. So, just make sure your slab is clean and free of any major cracking. It can also be laid on sand. We don’t necessarily recommend that for all installations, because the sand can allow it to shift or move a little bit too much.

This product is only two centimeters thick, so it has no vertical friction coefficient. So, as something like a concrete paver tries to shift, between the stones among themselves, there’s friction between them that prevent it from shifting. This product being only two centimeters thick does not provide for that vertical friction. So, if you’re laying it on an outdoor environment, we recommend something called Gator Base. This is an underlayment that goes directly below the porcelain tile, a bit like a subfloor in a house that helps to prevent it from shifting and moving. They also make spacers that will go between the porcelain tiles, providing the perfect spacing between each of them in the outdoor environment. When you fill the joints of these, you want to make sure you use the polymeric sand that’s rated for porcelain tile. This is a little bit stickier than the polymeric sand used for paving stones. Polymeric sand hardens a bit like a grout. It’s not a grout, but it hardens a bit like that to prevent weeds and keep the sand from migrating out of the joints. But make sure you use a polymeric sand that’s designed for outdoor porcelain tile.

Also, you want to consider in your design that you keep straight lines. Cutting this in a curved fashion would require special tools, and it’s very expensive, so you want to do your best to design an installation that follows those straight lines and has very little curves. Also, you wouldn’t want to use this in an area where you have a lot of different grade changes for drainage reasons. It’s better if you have one smooth grade going all in one direction, because of the size of these. It’s very hard to change elevations or grades in between locations, and because those grade changes can be very difficult to get the water to run off from those. So, those are your key elements of porcelain tiles. Thank you and good luck with your outdoor transformations.