When you shop at Southside Building Center, you can find tiles, tiles and more tiles that are useful for everything from a kitchen backsplash to your patio flooring. So when tiles are labeled as porcelain or ceramic, what does that mean exactly?
As a savvy shopper, you’ll notice right away that porcelain costs more than ceramic, although you won’t spend nearly as much at Southside as you would anywhere else for it. Porcelain’s biggest advantage is its water absorption rate of 0.5%.*
Indoor/Outdoor – This means that you could use porcelain outside. You won’t have to worry about this type of tile soaking up water, freezing and contracting, breaking into pieces. Overall, porcelain is denser and more durable that ceramic.
Porcelain might be the tile you choose for a high traffic area like your foyer, kitchen, or patio. Because of the way the tiles are processed, the color of a porcelain tile is consistent throughout the tile while the color on the top of a ceramic tile isn’t the same as what’s found in the middle of the same tile.
In other words, a chip won’t show a difference in color on a porcelain tile as it would for a ceramic tile.
Ceramic Means DIY-Friendly – The dense quality of porcelain makes cutting porcelain tiles a harder skill to master; however, ceramic’s softer composition makes it easier to work with for do-it-yourself projects. And our huge selection of ceramic tile means that you have lots of choices to create the floor you are imagining. We also have tools and materials to help you with your project.
Quality You’ll Recognize – Whether you choose ceramic or porcelain is entirely up to you, but you won’t find better prices on either category anywhere else! We have FloridaTile at such low prices that the factory won’t let us advertise them. We can’t tell you here, but drop by and see for yourself. The selection, the quality and the price can’t be beat.
* The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) sets that standard by first weighing a fired tile, then boiling it for 5 hours and allowing it to set in water for 24 hours. When it’s weighed, the tile must weigh less than 0.5% more than it did before — to be classified as genuine porcelain.