To tank or not to tank...?

[bean]

So I'm halfway through the bathroom refurb and had a bit of a panic.

At present the bath is in and I have plaster boarded around it with a gypsum based fleece tile board.

There will be a mains fed shower above the bath. I plan to tile around the bath, higher at the bower end.

My question is should I tank it or not?

I realise that cement backer board would have been better instead of gypsum based but its up now and I am loathe to remove and replace.

Thanks

Bean

[royaloakcarpentry]

No hard and fast rule that says it must or mustn't be done.

people vary rarely tank correctly unless it is a wet room. All they do is a partial job. Both scenarios if there is water ingress behind the tiles due to bad workmanship or lack of maintenance then when taking tiles off to repair you will damage the membrane.

Take tiles off of cement board and it will knacker it.

I say it time and time again. We refurb bathrooms (just bath and with shower over) and shower rooms and only encounter damaged plasterboards (bog standard ones) when there has been a lack of maintenance or the workmanship is poor even when we are ripping ones out that are 20 years old.

We go from normal plasterboard and upwards to fully tanked and have never had any problems. over 90% of our clients we see yearly too because we have to do plumbing checks every year. So if there was a problem, we would know and our clients would soon let us know, or more importantly the individual developments would soon know!!

Far better to tile a bath complete if it has a shower over. part tiled are the ones we always get remedial works to carry out on.