Reasons Your Drywall Tape is Peeling

Peeling tape is one of the most common problems with drywall. It can be a cosmetic issue, but it can also damage your walls.

Fortunately, there are a few easy repairs you can make to your peeling drywall tape. If you’re willing to put in the time, you can fix these issues and save yourself a lot of hassle.

Poor Adhesion

Drywall tape is usually made of paper, which can ripple, slip, bulge and bubble when it’s not properly adhered to the wall. Fortunately, you can avoid these problems by wetting the paper before you embed it in joint compound.

Alternatively, you can use a specialized drywall tape designed specifically for corners. This type of tape is creased to save you time and ensure a strong bond when you’re taping a corner.

Poor adhesion to a wall can also be caused by poor quality or faulty adhesive. This is because low-quality adhesives are less able to hold a paper-based material to drywall, which results in air bubbles forming underneath the tape that cause it to rippling.

Humidity

If you live in an area with high humidity, it’s likely that your drywall tape is peeling. Humidity is one of the main causes of drywall tape coming loose because it can cause bubbles, technically called blisters, and wrinkles on the tape.

Humidity also affects our health in several ways: it can make our skin and hair dry, increase our risk of developing infections, reduce the effectiveness of our immune system, and encourage mold growth inside our homes. It can also cause electronic equipment like computers and televisions to malfunction or stop working completely.

Relative humidity (RH) is a measurement of how much water vapor can be present in the air at any given time. Warmer air can hold more water vapor than colder air, and this means that RH is lower in warm air than cool air.

Absolute humidity is another common measure of humidity and it reflects the amount of water vapor that exists in a volume of air at a particular temperature. It’s expressed as grams of moisture per cubic meter of air (g/m3) and is higher in hotter environments.

Poor Quality

Drywall tape is an important part of any drywall repair job. It helps hold the pieces of drywall together while joint compound is applied and sanded.

Sometimes, however, poor quality drywall tape can cause rippling and bubbling issues. The reason for this is that the tape may not have the correct adhesion or surface compatibility with the wall.

You can prevent this problem from happening by ensuring you use a high-quality drywall tape. This type of tape is designed specifically for drywall surfaces and will not come off like a regular piece of paper tape.

When you have a piece of drywall tape that has peeled, remove it and replace it with a new one. Make sure the new tape is about a foot longer than the old tape in each direction to allow for proper adhesion.

Poor Application

Drywall tape can start to peel off for a number of reasons. The most common is poor application, but there are a few other reasons that could be responsible as well.

The simplest way to deal with this issue is to re-tape the area where the tape is peeling away. This can be done with self-adhesive mesh drywall tape.

This type of tape is stronger than paper tape and doesn’t crack as often. This makes it a good choice for high-stress areas, such as the joints in door and window openings.

Another reason that drywall tape might be peeling is due to water leakage or extreme shifting or settling of the home. If this is the case, it’s best to fix the underlying issue before you begin repairing the tape.

Ideally, you should apply joint compound on the area that needs to be patched, then use a mesh drywall tape over the exposed seam without overlapping existing tape. This method is best suited to minor drywall tape tears that are less than a foot long.