Ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω

The tile evaluation: qualitative or quantitative?

Talk about freezing and thawing cycles is aimed to wash out the human brain and turn people into zombies. Formally, the cycle is an exposure of a material (say clay) to a temperature alternation through the freezing point of water. No one knows how the cycles are related to real frost resistance of a material, and it is not clear to me why I should share a common misconception that many cycles is well and a few cycles is bad.
 
 “How many cycles can sustain your ceramic tile?”  People use to ask me.
 
“A lot of cycles!” I use to reply and make a mistake.
 
 There are already zombified and wait for Homer's style recital with the links to certificates and the results of laboratory tests. Here I intend to show that «A LOT» is a reliable criterion, comprehensively describing the properties of ceramic tiles.
 
The experiments were carried out in my workshop. Here you can find how to reach my workshop easy from anywhere in Catalonia. I took the raw (unfired!) clay tile with a thin layer of white clay on one side purchased from Ferrés Ceràmica. Then it was used a technique of underglaze painting (not to be confused with majolica!) with two firing: a bisque firing (after patterning) and a final one (after glazing). October 15, 2015 before the first snowfall, I put a tile in the worst conditions imaginable. It was a stone trough in the courtyard of my workshop in which for years of its stone life a sort of soil was formed consisted of loose slimy mess of half-decayed leaves, dead worms, mice feces, etc. March 31, 2016 the snow melting began, and I began to take photos. April 12th the snow has melted completely and I pulled the tile out  of the stone trough. I do not know how many cycles the tile withstood  over the winter, but I'm sure that there were "A lot of cycles”.

 
Nothing happened with it. It looks as good as new.