Before you begin you need to understand what you’re doing. When you tank a room you are effectively trying to prevent water escaping and causing damage to other parts of your property. This could be damage to ground floor ceilings where water has found its way through or damp into screeds causing floor covering damage. You are trying to incorporate a waterproof layer under your tiles………
There are differing ways to create this layer the most popular being:
- to roller or paint a rubberoid or acrylic coating such as Bal WP1 or Mapeigum over the area to be sealed, this system should be applied to dry backgrounds at a thickness of 1-2mm (poss 2 coats) and takes 24 hours to dry. On floors subject to deflection (eg wood flooring) then a reinforced layer must be added.
- to actually incorporate a mat / membrane such as Durabase WP or Homelux waterproof membrane into the tiling process. The area to be waterproofed is spread with your flexible adhesive and the membrane stuck over the top (as you would wallpaper).overlapping the joints. This type of membrane can be tiled with no waiting time and is the most time saving and straight forward to use
As well as the bigger areas any joints between walls and floors and corners in the shower area will need making waterproof as these points can often crack. This is done by way of a tape which is bonder into the angle creating a flexible seal. There are various tapes available but one with a width of around 150mm with a flexible central strip are good practice.
This is a brief explanation which I hope goes a little way to explaining the popular tanking options. If you have any questions I can be contacted through the forum, or through wetdecs
Tanking ….to get you started 
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