Terrace: 10mm tiles on drainage mortar

Hello everyone,

we are currently planning our terrace and, for cost reasons, we are relying on ceramic tiles. Normally, 20mm tiles are used for this when laid on drainage mortar. Unfortunately, the selection here is not particularly large, and as far as we know, 10mm tiles can also be used outdoors. One problem seems to be that when tapping them firmly, there is a higher risk that a 10mm tile will break, especially when the tiles have dimensions of 120x40 or 120x20.

Such a 10mm tile already seems very stable, and I can't really imagine that there will be more waste here. Well, if a few break, we can live with that, but if 50% break, that would be bad.

I wanted to ask if anyone has already laid 10mm tiles on drainage mortar and if they had any problems with it. We would like to use a 10mm tile but cannot assess how big the disadvantage is.

so long...

Hello,

we are currently laying 20mm tiles, but when choosing the tiles, I also asked various dealers and landscape gardeners if we could use 10mm instead. What everyone told us was that you can only lay 10mm tiles if the substrate is a concrete slab/concrete foundation (on top of which comes a drainage mat and then mortar + tiles), because otherwise the risk is too high that the substrate might still move a little later, and the 10mm tiles cannot absorb this movement as well as the 20mm ones, which can then lead to breaks/cracks. Regarding "breaking during installation," no one said anything (although I admittedly did not ask about that either).

In our case, the substrate is soil + gravel/mineral mixture, so we are using 20mm tiles.

Doesn’t answer your question 100%, but maybe helps a bit?

Thank you for the answer. Yes, it is not 100%, but still very helpful. If different people have advised against it for you and my landscape gardener would not do it either, then we will leave it alone. The likelihood that it will work is rather zero. Thank you!