Tile Spacers, Wedges, and Leveling Clips

Available from tile supply stores and home centers, tile spacers provide a handy means of spacing and adjusting tiles during installation. Made of flexible plastic, spacers set between tiles help keep them evenly spaced, producing grout joints of even width A.

Tile spacers are sized by the grout joint they’ll create—from 1/16 in. all the way up to 1/2 in. They come in two styles: X-shaped spacers are used in the junction between four tiles; T-shaped spacers are used where three tiles meet, as between field tile and trim or tiles laid in a brick or other alternating pattern.

Another kind of spacer, U-shaped spacers B, are made of hard plastic and are very useful for leveling a plywood rough top on countertops before installing backerboard. We consider them to be far superior to wood wedges as they are flat and come in three thicknesses: 1/16 in., 1/8 in., 1/4 in. These sizes allow for almost any counter leveling job. You can usually find U-shaped spacers at marble or granite supply warehouses.

Special tile-setting wedges C made of flexible, soft plastic are very handy for fine-tuning the position and alignment of tiles applied to vertical surfaces. You can use them either as adjusters to lift tiles as necessary or as spacers between tiles. For handmade, uneven tiles, you may even use two wedges stacked together for spacing purposes.

	A. Tile spacers hold the tile at a fixed distance, allowing you to create regular even grout lines.
	B. U-shape spacers are used to level plywood under countertops and come in different thicknesses.
	C. Use small flexible wedges to adjust the alignment of tiles on a vertical surface.

Leveling clips

Leveling clips or spacers are another type of grout joint spacer, usually part of a “system” that enables you to lift large-format tiles in relation to one another, basically to level adjacent tiles. You cannot prevent lippage caused by warped tiles, but leveling clips will “level the playing field,” so to speak, by giving you the flattest floors and walls possible. Leveling clips are valuable and necessary time savers if you plan to work with large-format tiles.

There are a multitude of manufacturers for varied types of leveling systems, and all of them do the job. Some clips require a specialized gun type of tool to tighten them, some twist into place, and some are locked in with a wedge. All perform the same task of leveling adjacent tiles to one another. Also, some systems have clips or spacers of varying widths to provide the grout joint size you desire. If you have a one-size clip leveling system and you want to install with a bigger grout joint, you can use traditional spacers (T- or X-shape) in the appropriate size.

	Leveling clip systems are important for installation of large-format tiles, and there are many varieties, both in size and type of system. Shown here, from left to right: gun and cap, wedge with one-size leveler, screw-type with various-size levelers, and wedge with various-size levelers.
	If the system you choose offers only one grout joint size, you can make a larger joint by inserting a traditional spacer at the intersections.

How Leveling Clips Work

Excerpted from Tiling Complete, 2nd Edition by Robin Nicholas and Michael Schweit.

Available in the Taunton Store and at Amazon.com.