Tile leveling system
Also called: leveling clips, tile leveling clips, lippage clips, tile spacers and wedges, leveling wedges, Raimondi, LASH system, tile leveler
Disposable clips slipped under the edges of adjacent tiles and tightened with wedges or screw caps while the mortar is wet, pulling the tile faces flush so no edge stands proud. Snapped off after cure; used on any tile 12 inches or bigger, and cheap insurance against lippage.
Large tile is rarely flat: a 12 × 24 porcelain has a slight bow from firing, and a 24 × 48 more so. Set two of them with an offset and the high middle of one lands beside the low end of the next — that step is lippage, and it’s what a toe catches and a raking light shows. A leveling system fights it mechanically. A clip with a flat base goes under the joint between two tiles as they’re set; a wedge is pushed through the clip’s slot, or a cap screwed down its post, until both tile faces are pressed to the same plane against the base. The mortar cures with the tiles held flush; the next day the clips’ stems snap off below the tile face and the base stays buried in the mortar.
What it does and doesn’t do. It levels tile to tile — it can’t fix a subfloor that’s humped or dished, and it can’t compensate for a thin or uneven mortar bed. The floor still has to be flat to 1/8 inch in 10 feet (tighter for large-format) and the tile still needs full coverage; a clip pulling a tile down into a void just leaves a hollow. Used with a 33% offset on rectangular tile and the right trowel, it makes a first-timer’s floor read as professional; used to force tile flat over a bad floor, it makes clips snap and tiles crack.
Cost is trivial — a couple hundred clips and a reusable set of wedges or caps is $30–$60, plus the pliers for the wedge type. Setters use them on everything over 12 inches; the DIY guide treats them as required on 12 × 24, and the large-format tier of the cost page budgets them across the whole floor.