Blanco Faucets Review & Rating Updated: December 14, 2024

Imported

China

Israel

Blanco America, Inc.
110 Mount Holly By-Pass
Lumberton, NJ 08048
(888) 668-6201
(800) 451-5782
customerservice@blancoamerica.com

Blanco Canada, Inc
737 Jutland Road
Etobiocoke, Ontario MBZ 2G6
(877) 425-2626
info@blancocanada.com

Blanco GmbH & Co. KG
Flehinger Straße 59
Oberderdingen
Germany
49 7045 44-81299
nfo@blanco.de

Rating

Business Type

Product Range

Kitchen, Bar and Prep faucets

Certifications

Brands

Blanco

Street Price

$185-$2,200

Warranty Score

Cartridge

lifetime¹

Finishes

Lifetime

Mechanical Parts

Lifetime

Proof of Purchase

Required

Transferable

No

Footnotes:

1. "The term "lifetime" is not defined. The usual court interpretation where the term is not defined is until the consumer dies.

• Read the Blanco faucet warranty.
• Learn more about faucet warranties.

This Company In Brief

Blanco is a German company that designs and sells sinks and faucets.

Some of the sinks are made in Germany. The faucets are not. Blanco has never manufactured faucets. The faucets are designed by Blanco in Germany but manufactured by companies in China and Israel.

Nevertheless, these are good faucets built with high-quality components throughout, backed by a standrd lifetime warranty from a well-established company.

Blanco's customer service, however, needs a lot of improvement.

Blanco sells only kitchen, prep, and bar faucets, nothing for the bathroom. The faucets are accessories to its principal product, kitchen sinks. Many can be finished to exactly match a Blanco sink.

Blanco 's main business is designing and selling kitchen sinks. It has been owned by E.G.O. Elektro-Geraete GmbH & Co. Holding KG since the 1970s.

The Company

Founded in 1925 as Blanco & Co. by Hein­rich Blanc and August Tref­fin­ger, the company's first products were tanks that attached to coal stoves for heating water.

By the 1930s, the company was manufacturing accessories for electric stoves.

Its manufacturing of stainless steel sinks did not begin until the 1950s, to supply the Post-War building boom in Germany.

It is the largest sink manufacturer in Ger­many, and one of the largest in the world, rivaled in North Amer­ica and Eur­ope only by .

Starting with stainless steel sinks in 1951, the company has since added engineered composite sinks and porcelain ceramic sinks to its lineup.

Blanco manufactures its com­posite (Sil­gran­it^®, Pura­Dur^®), and some porcelain sinks in Sins­heim, Ger­many and Tor­onto in company-owned facilities.

Most of its porcelain sinks are manufactured in Is­tan­bul, Tur­key by Blanco Öztiryakiler Mutfak Donan San. Tic. A.S., a joint venture between Blan­co and the Turk­ish home products company, Öztirya­kiler Group.

Blanco makes some Steel­art^® stainless steel sinks in Sulz­feld, Ger­many. But, most of the stainless sinks sold by Blanco in North America are imported from China.

Blanco's known Chinese suppliers of stainless steel sinks and sink accessories are:

Yingao Kitchen Utensils, Binoya Metal Products, and Rainbow Industrial also manufacture sinks and sink accessories for

Blanco Faucet Designs

Blanco faucets are accessories to Blanco kitchen sinks. Many are available in finishes that exactly match the color and texture of Blanco porcelain and composite sinks.

The faucets emphasize style, and Blanco frequently refers to itself as a "design" company. Blanco design is the province of chief designer Claudia Simone Hoff whose team of in-house designers is responsible for Blanco's well-defined "look", which Ms. Hoff characterizes as "modern but not faddish."

Blanco faucets have won numerous awards in international design competitions, including the Red Dot award, the German IF award, the Designpreis Deutschland (German Design Prize) and the coveted Good Design Award sponsored by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, the oldest and most prestigious of the international design awards.

Blanco Faucet Manufacturers

Blanco does not manufacture faucets. It never has. The company designs the faucets. Contract manufacturers produce them. Companies known to supply Blanco faucets include:

If you buy a Blanco faucet, you are not getting a German faucet. You are buying a German-designed faucet that was neither manufactured in Germany nor by Blanco. It has never been to Germany or been touched by a German. It is Chinese faucet wrapped in a German brand name.

For a designer faucet manufactured by Germans in Germany, try

Copies and Counterfeits

A designer faucet company like Blanco has to keep producing new designs at a fairly steady pace to keep ahead of copy-cats and outright counterfeiters.

Protecting a design is very difficult.

Most countries allow only very limited copyright or patent protection for the design elements of a faucet.

It is not at all hard to reverse engineer a successful faucet design, make subtle changes to avoid patent infringement, and then manufacture knock-offs in great quantities for a much lower price than the original designer company can afford.

As a result, the lifespan of a successful faucet design is about five years, after which time it has been so widely copied that the faucet is no longer fresh or new.

Many original Blanco fau­cet designs have reached this stage in their life-cycle, and have been widely copied. But while the design might be available as a knock-off for a lower price, what is not available in the wide range of unique Blanco faucet finishes.

Blanco is also one of the German faucet grands that are widely counterfeited, and unless you take the faucet aparts, the fakes are very hard to distinguish from the real thing.

Your best protection against counterfeit Blanco faucets is to buy onlyfrom a trusted source.

Blanco Faucet Finihes

Blanco is well-known for its adventures in faucet finishes.

It offers the usual set of metallic finishes: Chrome, Nickel, and Oil Rubbed Bronze (which is, as usual, neither oiled nor rubbed), and two stainless steel finishes: Classic Steel and PVD steel

Classic steel is just the stainless steel material of the faucet cleaned up and buffed to a nice semi-polished finish. PVD steel is a coating applied to faucets to make them look like stainless steel faucets even if they are made of brass.

PVD steel has two advantages over native steel. First, it resists fingerprints. Native steel shows the print of every finger that touches it and is more of a maintenance chore.

PVD is much harder than native steel and resists scratches much more readily. The actual metal used is usually titanium or zirconium, very hard metals, applied by vaporizing the metal into its individual atoms and then blasting them onto the faucet. A PVD coating is very thin but very tough, impervious to most damage.

In addition to finishing faucets with metallic coatings, Blanco can also match the colors and textures of its sinks. It offers eight colors to match its porcelain sinks and nine finishes to match its Silgranite sinks, not just in color but in texture as well.

Some of these are in which one part of the faucet is finished to match the sink, and the rest of the faucet is finished in one of Blanco's metallic coatings, usually Chrome or one of the steel finishes.

However, not every Blanco faucet is available with every Blanco finish. The finish selection for a faucet usually depends on the finishes available from a particular manufacturer. The most readily available finishes are the stainless steels and Chrome.

Blanco Website

Blanco's North American website is colorful, beautifully illustrated, and designed to display properly on any size screen from smartphone to full-size desktop.

Finding a faucet is easy for two reasons:

• Blanco offers only ten faucet collections in North America containing 21 individual faucet models. Some companies offer dozens of collections and hundred of models.
• The website includes a very effective filter option that permits the selection of a faucet by type (kitchen or bar), finish, configuration (pulldown, high arc, etc.), and flow rate.

We tried every combination we could think of. The filtering is very accurate.

However, once you find a faucet, however, the information provided about the faucet is nowhere near adequate for an informed buying decision.

Each faucet listing displays a summary of the faucet's features – useful but not very detailed. Links are provided to the finishes available on the faucet and a .pdf specification sheet that has a little more detail but is more or less a repeat of the summary already displayed.

Certifications are listed, but in industry abbreviations that are not at all familiar to an average consumer. Most consumers don't know, for example, that "CEC" means that the faucet is approved for sale and use in California. An explanation of what the abbreviations mean would be most useful. One reference "George SB 370" had us scratching our heads. We think it is a reference to Maryland's lead-free statute, SB 370, but we have never heard of it being called "George."

Much essential information about the faucet is missing. For example, there is no link to the faucet's warranty, no exploded parts list, no installation instructions, and no identification of the ceramic cartridge used in the faucet.

The warranty is on the site, but the only link is through a tab at the top of the page marked "Service". We found it pretty much by accident, clicking every tab until we found the word "warranty" in the drop-down list.

Faucet cartridges are described simply as "ceramic cartridge". The generic description does not provide enough information. Forty years ago ceramic cartridges were new so the identification of a faucet's cartridge as "ceramic" meant you were getting the latest and greatest technology.

Times have changed. All but the least expensive modern residential faucets are built around a ceramic cartridge. But, there are very good and not so very good ceramic cartridges made in this world. The best will last a lifetime, the worst a few years at most, which is why the actual identity of the cartridge-maker helps in deciding which fau­cet to buy. If Blanco uses good cartridges, it should have no problem disclosing their identity.

The Blanco Warranty

Blanco's warranty is about average for faucet warranties in North America. It guarantees all parts and finishes for a "lifetime" unless the faucet is installed in a multi-family unit or used for commercial purposes, then the warranty period is 10 years and 5 years respectively.

It contains some oddities, however. For example, it never indicates that type of defects it protects against, only the types it does not protect against, which are …

" … reasonable wear and tear, misuse, abuse, neglect or improper or incorrectly performed installation, maintenance or repair, including failure to follow the applicable care and cleaning instructions."

It does not cover shipping costs, labor costs, or any other costs associated with the installation or replacement of the product or parts.

If a faucet is defective, what Blanco will do to remedy the problem is >/p>

"repair or replace at no charge, excluding labor and freight, any faucet supplied by BLANCO that is proven to be defective under normal use."

The warranty lasts for a "lifetime", but what Blanco means by lifetime is never explained. There are several possibilities: the lifetime of the owner, the lifetime of the faucet, even the lifetime of the company.

One clue is that the warranty is "extended only to the original consumer purchaser of the faucet", so it cannot possibly outlast the actual lifetime of the buyer. But, it could last the entire lifetime of the original owner, even if the original owner no longer owns the faucet.

Consider the following example:

An odd result indeed, and almost certainly not what Blanco intended, but that's the way Blanco has elected to write its warranty, so that is the legal result of its chosen language.

Some provisions in the warranty border on sheer commercial lunacy.

For instance, the warranty requires the customer to pay for shipping a replacement faucet from Blanco. This requirement almost certainly costs the company more in goodwill than it will ever hope to save in UPS charges.

Days or weeks without a working faucet is already a major aggravation. Niggling the customer for shipping charges will almost certainly add to his vexation and will undoubtedly be widely shared with friends, relatives, the guys and gals around the watercooler, and the folks in the carpool – at great length and more than once – substantially decreasing the probability that any of them will ever consider buying a Blanco product.

Blanco Customer Service

What the company should be aiming for is a customer that sings the praises of Blanco's speedy and efficient warranty service. But, if that is the company's aim, this provision is off-target by a metric mile. And Blanco's customer service is anything but speedy and efficient.

On its website, Blanco claims that it is "here for you." We are not sure what that means, but it certainly does not refer to its customer service.

Blanco's complaint resolution and warranty services were at one time exceptional, earning the company a coveted A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau. It has slipped badly, however, to a rating of F, the BBB's lowest rating possible, as of the date of this review.

The contact-us page on its website provides only one means for contacting Blanco: through an email and then only for

• General suggestions and feedback
• Concerns or complaints about a Blanco product, or
• Questions about blanco cleaning products or spare parts

But, unless you are willing to reveal quite a lot of personsonal information such as your name, address, and telephone number, you cannot use the online conttact form. The only information it actually needs to reply to an email is the senders email addres. The rest of the information is solely for marketing purposes, and is really none of the company's business.

Blanco no longer publishes its customer service telephone numbers on its websites. (But, you can find the numbers in the heading above.)

Although there are separate telephone numbers for U.S. and Canadian customer service, all representatives are actually located in Canada. And, while Blanco invites consumers to "reach us at any time", the process of reaching a Blanco customer service agent is an experience that would try the saintly patience of Mother Teresa.

On our first seven tries, the U.S. customer service number did nothing but repeat the same automated message over and over no matter which option we pressed to exit. The only way to kill the message was to hang up. On the eighth call, we were able to get into the queue for a representative. It took 20 minutes of being asked repeatedly to "please remain on the line for the next available representative" before we got to speak to a tired, harried, and irritated live person. However, she could not answer our basic faucet questions and asked us to put it in an e-mail. We did so and are still waiting for an answer.

This situation is not the fault of the customer service representative. It is systemic. There are too few customer service representatives to handle the volume of customer service requests, and they are not well trained. That is the fault of management.

Based on this experience, we rate customer service a 1 on a scale of 1 to 5. A far cry from our earlier score of 4.3. Any score below 4 is unacceptable.

For more information on understanding and interpreting faucet warranties, and how they should influence your buying decision, see Faucet Warranties.

Counterfeit Faucets

More than most mainstream faucet companies, Blanco seems to have a lot of trouble with counterfeiters and infringers.

Its name is a large part of its infringement issues. It means "white" in any number of Romance languages, so any faucet manufacturer who uses "Blanco" in a model name has to be careful of infringing on Blanco's ownership of that name. In 2013 Blanco sued Vlanco Industries, LLC and others in federal court for trademark infringement. The case was settled but Vlanco was subsequently docked $600,000 and attorney' fees by the court for breaching the settlement agreement.

Counterfeit Blanco faucets are also a problem. If you find an exceptional value on a Blanco faucet (or sink) at a non-traditional source such as an online auction site, there is a strong likelihood that it is a counterfeit faucet.

For a genuine Blanco faucet, stick to known suppliers. You will pay a little more but, for that modest addition, you get the benefit of Blanco's quality and warranty. Blanco does not provide post-sales service to counterfeit faucets, or any faucets bought outside of its authorized dealer network.

Counterfeit Faucets: For more on black market and counterfeit faucets, see Illegal and Black Market Faucetsin North America

Testing & Certification

Comparable Faucets

Imported and domestic faucets comparable to Blanco for quality, warranty, but usually with much better post-sale customer service include:

Conclusions

Our take on Blanco is that the faucets are not a reasonable value in its category of luxury faucets. Their only value to a Blanco sink owner, however, is color matching, and any color matching is going to boost the price, often considerably.

The company has updated its warranty since we noted its deficiencies in our last report, and has imp;roved it considerably. However, it still has problems. The company needs to have its warranty revised by an experienced warranty lawyer.

Blanco does not identify the source of its faucet cartridges on its website. If you are looking to buy a Blanco faucet, get the identity of the cartridge manufacturer from customer service. Do not buy any faucet unless you know who made the cartridge and that the manufacturer is one of the good ones. See Faucet Valves and Cartridges for that information.

If you buy a Blanco faucet, however, hope it never breaks. If it does you will have to deal with Blanco customer service, and that service is in shambles from mismanagement.

If you have experience with Blanco faucets, good, bad, or indifferent, we would like to hear about it, so please starcraftreviews@yahoo.com or post a comment below.