MAPEI Flexcolor 1-Gallon Truffle Acrylic Premix Sanded Grout

NOT FOR MARBLE, SAVE YOURSELF

Marble is a soft, porous natural stone, and I learned the hard way that this grout uses quartz beads instead of sand - quartz is harder than marble! So even if you got lucky and applied/installed it perfectly with no grout haze or residue left behind, by merely applying this grout the quartz beads can scratch the soft marble tiles on installation. This is just 1 of the problems with this grout. The other is the working time and acrylic nature of it, makes it nearly impossible to clean the grou...

Great grout for most uses

Great product that I use almost all the time. For the high end bathrooms, I do use spectralock 1, comes in at about twice the cost but it doesn’t have the sanded texture. Negative reviews really are poor installation. Just read the directions and work fast. This product is stain resistant, non porous so works very well for shower floors and walls. I’ve never had an issue or call back from this product. Some advice on installation: work fast. Small areas, do as much as you can as directions, re...

Color is true and results are pleasing;

I recently redid my kitchen backsplash; it was my first largish tiling job. I looked at a lot of grout reviews before I picked this grout, in the silver color. I'm glad I chose this product. The color is as presented on the package; many cement based grouts have complaints about the color. Another advantage: I won't have to use sealer on it as time passes. Some reviews say that this is not a grout for the inexperienced, but I disagree. It does take a fair amount of time, possibly more that a...

Difficult to install cleanly.

With a non-glossy porcelain floor tile, this grout dried on the surface extremely quickly. Dragging a sponge did little in 5 minutes. Pushing harder or scouring lightly with a white nylon pad removed grout a bit deep into the 1/8" gaps. Followed directions the best I could. Tried different sponges and scourers. Result is my grout is low, the tiles have some tough resin/sand mix to remove. Grout surface is not very smooth either, rather gritty. Now need to top off several joints and relive the e...

MISLEADING MSDS, BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE

I used Mapei product in other projects in the past and absolutely loved them. I just built a new bathroom and was concerned about porousity of the shower floor grout using flat river rock. after much research and a referal by a tile professional (who said he used it) I bought this. which by the way is 5x the price of normal grout. i followed the instructions exactly. first of all, it dried super fast. i had to clean after only doing 3 square feet. i literally had to hard scrub each and every riv...

read the instructions

the instructions are not a suggestion. when they say 5-8 minutes to clean, they absolutely mean it. do not slather tons of it on the wall thinking you have thirty minutes like when you normally mix grout. think small. work small areas. one commenter suggested 5 min timers every time, and that's what I did. it came out great. also if you're like me and want to get all the extra sand off when you're doing the clean, you might saturate the grout line with water, and it'll turn a lighter color (I wa...

DIY Best Product

I would give this product more stars if I could! This premixed grout was the best thing I could have done for my tile job, the price is worth it for the convenience and consistency. The pictures are of my master bedroom and it was my first ever attempt at tiling. No fuss with measurements, water temperature, working time, none of that. Stays good in the container between applications, just mix it up a bit before resuming. I wouldn’t use any other product unless there was a very specific color ...

Yes but...

The good: When it dries the color is very even. It works into the joints well. 90% of the residue can be cleaned off by carefully using a float in the manner recommended The bad: Installing quarry tile at about 65 degrees with the floor only slightly cooler the residue on the tile skins over in a few minutes, long before the joints set. This makes for a huge pain as it's virtually impossible to clean the tile surface without disrupting the still fluid joint material. I used the grout strai...

First time using grout....

We used this product for our 3x6 subway tile backsplash in the kitchen. First time using grout so the premixed aspect was the main reason I got this grout. I had enough fun mixing thinset and dealing with pot life. The other aspect I like is you can add this grout to existing Flexcolor in case you miss a spot. Mapei recommended a hard / firm rubber epoxy float and I'm glad I used it. I focused on filling the individual grout lines instead of sweeping over the entire tile space. It was a work o...

Looks great, easy to use

I got pretty nervous and almost had buyer’s remorse when I searched YouTube for installation videos after I had ordered the product but before I had received it. I found quite a few negative comments from apparent (or at least self-proclaimed) professionals about how hard it was to work with. I have no idea why unless they really were professionals afraid of amateur competition. My experience couldn’t have been much better or easier. I am by no means a professional or expert, but I have installe...