guv wrote:

On the point you are making about snapping them up? What am I looking
for? I wasnt sent whole tiles, just small peices - and I was able to
break one of the peices just by bashing against one of the others. So
they are quite brittle. The big test would be if they were laid and I
hit them hard with something! I dont have the luxury of that test! ;-)

Is there anything I should be looking for specifically?

Porcelain is a lot like glass. Look at the snapped cross-section - it
should be uniform, the same colour all the way. It should also look
slightly glassy.


One reason I think they may not be porcelain, is the fact there is a
definate side they need to be laid. ie they have ridges like you would
find on ceramics to help adhesive adhere to them. Is that normal?

Yes, many (most?) porcelain tiles have ridges on the back.


I
know the few tiles I looked at, seemed to be the same on both sides.

Some are, but most of the 30x30cm ones had ridges.


Also, they are not as think as I had expected. Not much thinker, if
anything, than I think a 30cmx30cm ceramic would be.

Ours were maybe 10mm thick.


Im certainly not bothered if they are "fakes" - from a snobby angle.
If they have similar properties, that would be good enough. I will
probably take the samples into a tile shop and ask them! As you can
appreciate, describing things is a little difficult, when you dont
know how to specifically describe the texture you would actually
expect them to be when broken!

If they're uniform throughout, and the broken edge looks slightly glassy
(certainly not porous), they're porcelain.


--
Grunff