Kraus Faucets: Best In-Depth Independent Review (2024)

Summary

This Company In Brief

Kraus is an importer of above-average to good quality Chinese-made faucets that it sells through internet venues, including most plumbing supply sites, and big-box lumber stores such as Home Depot. The faucets are sourced from a variety of suppliers.

In addition to faucets, it sells sinks, showers, and accessories, often in coordinated collections for that well-put-together look.

The Kraus faucet warranty is sub-par, providing a mere five years of protection on the most important component of the faucet, its cartridge, and just one year on spray heads and hoses.

Since December 31, 2020, Kraus has been a part of Masco Corporation, operating as an "affiliate" of Masco's .

Founded in 2007 by Russell Levi and Michael Rukhlin, two New York entrepreneurs, Kraus is an importer of above-average to good quality Chinese-made faucets that it sells through internet venues, including most plumbing supply sites, and big-box lumber stores such as Home Depot.

In addition to faucets, it sells sinks, showers, and accessories, often in coordinated collections for that well-put-together look. It can even provide flooring.

Kraus Exquisite lavatory faucet in polished chrome.

The company has been very successful, carefully threading its way between the obstacles that impair most faucet-seller success with a carefully selected inventory of stylish products.

It has been so successful, in fact that in December 2020 it was purchased from its founding partners by Masco Corporation, the owner of the Bris­tan Group, Ltd. in the U.K.

Masco was founded in 1929 as Masco Screw Prod­ucts Comp­any by Alex Man­oog­ian, an Ar­men­ian from Smyr­na, Tur­key who fled to the U.S. at age 18 from the Ar­men­ian Geno­cide (1915-1918). The company was renamed Masco Corporation in 1981.

Mr. Manogian's pleasant demeanor and engaging smile masked one of the shrewdest minds in American industry. Before his death at age 95, he had grown the company into what may be the largest building products company in the world.

How the addition of Kraus benefits the Masco empire is not altogether clear.

Kraus Bolden kitchen faucet in split Champagne Bronze and Matte Black.

Most of Masco's faucet subsidiaries are manufacturers to some degree or another. Kraus, however, is not a manufacturer – although the company routinely identifies itself as such in its literature and press releases including the release announcing its sale to Masco in which it claimed:

Kraus USA has been transforming the kitchen and bathroom industry for over a decade, with a long history of manufacturing exceptional sinks, faucets, and accessories for the modern kitchen and bathroom. (emphasis supplied)

It is evident from our research, however, that the company has no history whatsoever of manufacturing sinks, faucets, or accessories, — exceptional or otherwise. It is purely an importer — a very successful importer to be sure, but nothing more than an importer.

Its products, including its faucets, are manufactured by other companies, almost all located in China.

Manufacturers that have supplied Kraus with faucets over our look-back period of 60 months include:

• CAE Sanitary Fittings Industrial Co. Ltd. sells its own CAE brand faucets worldwide. It also manufactures faucets for other faucet companies including

• CAE is known for casting its faucets from DZR brass, an alloy that resists a chemical process called dezincification.

• Brass is an alloy of mostly copper and zinc. In contact with water passing through a faucet, the brass tends to lose its zinc molecules, which over many years can leave the brass weak and spongy.

• DZR is very resistant to the process but manufacturing with DZR is a little tricky since very precise temperature control is required during casting and other hot-metal operations to ensure that the brass does not lose its zincification-resistant properties.

• CAE is primarily an manufacturer, but it also sells faucets under the CAE brand, primarily in Asia and the Midddle East. Some CAE faucets are avaiable in the U.S. from select outlets, however, including SolaVanity that sells some upscale CAE faucets including the award-winning Edolo faucet.

Kraus Ansel oull-down kitchen faucet in polished chrome.

• Huayi Group is a collection of companies involved in some manner in metal fabrication and finishing. These include (Kaiping) Frendo Sanitary Ware Ltd., Huayi Plumbing Fittings Industry, (Kaiping) Euopea Plumbing Apparatus Co., Giada Star Sanitary Ware Co., Huayi Plating Factory, and Huayi Die-Casting Factory.

• The group sells faucets worldwide under the Huayi and Freendo brands and manufactures faucets for other companies to sell under their own brands.

• Some of its North American customers, other than Kraus, include Northern Central Distributing selling faucets under the

• It als manfactures faucets for other companies at almost all price points from world class, high style faucets for

• is one of China's largest faucet manufacturers for the export market.

• It sells just a few Lota-brand faucets in Morth America, but manufactures for so many North American faucet companies that it has established a U.S.-based English-language service center to provide customer support and replacement parts.

• Lota manufactures store brand faucets for large retailers including many of the

• It also manufacturers faucets or faucet components for the who's who of the North American faucet industry, including

• (Hunan) Sento Stainless Steel Sanitary Ware Co. Ltd. is a Chinees manufacturer of good quality stainless steel faucets some of which are designed by Swedish designer Anders Kristiansson, the co-owner of Revolt Design and Radie Kb in Gothenberg. He has won a number of juried international awards for his designs including the prestigeous iF prize awarded by the iF International Forum Design and a Red Dot award sponsored by the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen

• It itroduced its first stainless steel faucets in 2006. It sells Sento-branded faucets over most of the world and manufactures stainless steel kitchen faucets for Kraus.

All of these manufacturers are .

These companies have been Kraus' consistent faucet suppliers for the better part of a decade. In the past, however, it has bought faucets from other manufacturers, including Yatin Bath Corporation. This relationship has now ended.

The company does an enormous volume of business.

It has received over 3,000 import shipments from Asia in the 43 months since August 2018, an average of two deliveries each day, and there is no indication that the volume of its imports is decreasing.

Kraus has made what seems to be a concerted and continuing effort to distinguish itself from the deluge of Asian importers that are flooding North America with questionable quality Chinese faucets. It has improved both the style and quality of its faucet lines over the past five years.

Kraus faucets are, for the most part, heavy, durable faucets that should give years and years of reliable service. All of the Kraus faucets we examined were well made with thick-walled brass castings or sturdy stainless steel construction with careful finishing.

Its brass faucets are not all brass, however. Some Kraus faucets contain zinc or a zinc/aluminum alloy and some plastic components. Zinc or its alloys in non-critical parts is not usually a problem. For faucet components not under water pressure such as handled and base plates, zinc is perfectly adequate, and because it is much less expensive than low-lead brass, its use saves a few dollars in production costs.

Kraus KPF1622SN single-handle pull down kitchen faucet with dual function spray in satin nickel.

Plastic is another matter. Plastic in contact with water is too prone to chemical deterioration for use in a lifetime product such as faucets and should be avoided. Be especially wary of plastic spray heads on Kraus' pull-down and pull-out kitchen faucets. Plastic spray heads seem to be a constant source of failure problems and customer complaints, not just in Kraus faucets but in all faucet lines that use them, including some very up-scale faucets.

Kraus is very aware of the plastic problem and guarantees its plastic heads for just one year compared to a lifetime guarantee on the metal parts of the faucet.

Many of Kraus' single handle mixing faucets include a ceramic cartridge made by Kerox, Kft, a Hungarian ceramics manufacturer that enjoys a worldwide reputation for solid, reliable cartridges. Kerox is the ceramic cartridge preferred by many high-end European faucet brands.

We also identified mixing cartridges from Sedal S.L.U., a Spanish manufacturer that makes its cartridges in three factories in China and Kuching International, Ltd., a China-based manufacturer of the widely used KCG cartridge.

These cartridges do not have the solid reputation of a Kerox cartridge. But, the difference between first-rank and second-rank cartridges is narrowing rapidly, and these Chinese-made cartridges are completely serviceable and robust enough to give years of trouble-free service.

Some of the Kraus two-handle faucets we examined were equipped with Flühs Drehtechnik, GmbH cartridge, considered by many to be the finest stem cartridge made for two-handle faucets. Other faucets appear to be equipped with cartridges from Guang­dong Hent Tech­nolo­gy Co., Ltd., one of the oldest of China's technical ceramics companies. Hent makes a good cartridge, but not of the same high quality as the Flühs product.

We have not examined every one of the hundreds of faucet models sold by Kraus, however, so we cannot guarantee that every faucet contains a good-quality ceramic cartridge. So, if you are considering a Kraus faucet, check its website specifications to look for its cartridge by name. If it is not identified by name, telephone customer support for that information.

The Faucet Cartridge: Kraus' very limited 5-year warranty on faucet cartridges of concern. Its cartridge is the heart of a modern faucet. It is the part that controls water flow and temperature. Its finish may fail and the faucet will still work, it may be discolored, corroded, and ugly but water still flows. But, if a cartridge fails, the faucet is out of business until it is replaced. A five-year warranty on this essential faucet component is not nearly adequate.

In addition to improving quality, Kraus has concentrated a considerable effort on improving the design of its faucets, a somewhat challenging objective when sourcing faucets from China.

Design adventures in China are rare. Chinese manufacturers gravitate toward conventional designs to reach the widest possible market and, to reduce market risk even further, tend to copy successful North American and European designs. If a faucet sells well on either continent, it will soon appear, in Chinese faucet catalogs (in slightly modified form to avoid patent infringement lawsuits).

Kraus Indy lavatory faucet in four finishes: brushed Gold, Stainless Steel, Matte Black, and Matte Black with Stainless Steel accents.

That is slowly changing, however. CAE has avoided the limitations of Chinese design by hiring an Italian company, Slide Design, to create its new collection of faucets. They were designed by Slide's noted industrial designer Itamar Harari. One of these designs, the Edolo faucet, won an iF Design Award in 2016. IF is an international design competition sponsored by iF International Forum Design GmbH since 1953. Kraus does not, however, sell the Edolo faucet.

The company offers two finishes available on almost all faucets: polished chrome and oil-rubbed bronze,. kitchen faucets are available in eleven other finishes some of which are combinations such as chrome with matte black. The pallette for bathroom faucets is more limited and includes two split finishes, brushed nickel with satin nickel and chrome with brushed nickel.

The number of finishes offered for a particular faucet depends on two factors. The first is the finishes available from the manufacturer that makes the faucet – Kraus does none of its own finishing and can offer only those finishes available from its faucet suppliers. The second consideration is how much inventory Kraus wants to maintain. Each new finish means a considerable increase in the number of faucets, faucet accessories (base plates, wall plates, etc.) and spare parts Kraus has to maintain in stock.

The Kraus website is a reasonably well-designed, no-nonsense site that does not overuse flashy full-color images that get in the way of efficient navigation. Navigation is menu-driven and intuitive. At no time did we reach a point on the website from which we did not know where to go next.

Drilling down to a faucet that may meet your needs and design preference is made easy by filters that allow you to select for faucet configuration, height, finish, the number of holes required to mount the faucet, and so on. The filtering is reasonably accurate.

Each time a filter is selected, however, the site jumps back to the top of the page requiring the user to scroll down again to select the next filter item. It is poor web design and could easily be cured by an Apply Filters button that allows the user to select all applicable filters before the page is refreshed.

Once a suitable faucet is identified, the information needed to make an informed buying decision is extensive but not quite complete, and sometimes presented in code rather than plain English.

Faucets are well illustrated with multiple images showing the faucet from various angles and in several installations. Tabs across the bottom of the listing provide access to:

• Details lists some of the features of the faucet in the form of what is essentially a sales pitch, and can be safely skipped.

• Questions/Answers lists questions about the faucet and answers provided by Kraus or one of its retail outlets. These are helpful only if you can't find an answer to your questions someplace else.

• Specifications does not contain much in the way of actual specifications and often contains information that cannot possibly pertain to a faucet. The Bolden kitchen faucet, for example, contain the following specification: "Bottom Grid Included: No".

• No faucet has a bottom grid. That specification applies only to sinks.

• For actual detailed specification you will have to open the "Faucet Spec. Sheet" under the Documentation tab.

• Reviews. These are past customer reviews. Some Kraus faucets have more than 1,000 of them ranging, as you might expect, from five stars to one star, many taken from retail seller websites. The range of reviews seems to be normal, with no indication of manipulation by Kraus to skew the results.

• Documentation is the real source of solid information abou the faucet in the form of downloadable .pdf documents.
  • Faucet Spec. Sheet: Lists all of the detailed specifications about the faucet indluding the material from which the faucet is made, a dimensioned drawing, finishes available, accessories included, and codes and standards certifications.
  • Unfortunately, the certifications are listed in codes that mean nothing to the average buyer. To help with understanding, we have set out the codes and their meanings in a table on this page.
  • Some of the specifications are a little iffy. For example, bodies of many faucets are described as being "metal", but the specific metal is not identified. We assume that the term is used to obscure the fact that a brass or stainless steel body also contains some zinc or a zinc alloy.
  • Sprayers are usually identified as made of "ABS", a code used by many faucet companies to mean "plastic." A more information description would be "ABS plastic" to clarify that ABS is a type of plastic.
  • The cartridge used in the faucet is identified as a "ceramic cartridge". The source of the ceramic cartridge is not identified. As Kraus uses what appear to be good-quality cartridges, it should have no concern about identifying the cartridge by name. Util it does, however, the careful buyer will telephone customer support to fget the source of the cartridge before buying.
  • Faucet Instruction Manual: is the installation guide and it should be identified as "Installation Instructions" to better inform the reader. The installation instructions are clear and precise. Our plumbers had no difficulty installing the faucets and rated installation "easy" on our four-point scale of "very easy" to "very hard." The guide also contain an exploded parts diagram in case you ever need to order a replacement part. However, the diagram does not provide the part number, which as one reader pointed out, calls into question whether Kraus actually has the parts for sale.
  • Care and Cleaning Guide: is a set of generic cleaning instructions for all Kraus products including its sinks. The guide is well-written and should be required reading for every Kraus faucet owner. What can safely be ignored is the document's instruction to register your new Kraus faucet in order to "Get Exclusive Kraus Offers & Promotions" unless, of course, you actually want to receive exclusive Kraus offers and promotions.
  • Warranty PDF: is a link to the Kraus faucet warranty.

The company has upgraded the length of its warranty from 10 years to a lifetime warranty on some components of its faucets including its finishes. This is a step in the right direction which suggests that the company is gaining more confidence in its products.

Some parts, however, have a much shorter warranty. Cartridges are still guaranteed for just 5 years and a "faucet's sprayhead assembly (including the engine, aerators, structure, restrictors, back flow preventers, sprayer hoses, braided supply line hoses which encompasses nylon, silicon and stainless steel)" are guaranteed for 1 year. The very short warranty suggests that most if not all of Kraus' spray heads are plastic and that Kraus has no confidence in their longevity.

This wording of this provision is somewhat confusing. We have never seen an "engine" in a spray head and have no idea to which component the term refers. We have also never seen a sprayhead assembly with its own supply line. Supply lines connect the faucet to the water supply usually at a shutoff valve under the sink. We have never seen one connected directly to a sprayhead assembly.

The company at one time required that all faucets be installed by a licensed and insured "trade professional" experienced "in the installation of bathroom and kitchen manufactured goods." Now such installation is merely "recommended."

The company guarantees to have the parts needed to fix a defective or broken faucet for just five years. Interesting to us is the question of how the company intends to honor its lifetime warranty if, twenty years from now, a Kraus faucet breaks the but company does not have the parts to fix it, having run out of parts after five years.

In a prior report, we identified several legal problems with the Kraus warranty that violated the Mag­nu­son-Moss War­ranty Act (15 U.S.C. §2308), the federal law that dictates the minimum content of and sets the rules for consumer product warranties in the United States, and suggested to the company that it needed a complete rewrite by a lawyer who understood warranty law.

Kraus did rewrite its warranty and it now fully complies with federal law.

Customer and warranty service varies in quality. It is not unusual to experience long waits to talk to a customer service representative, and then be asked to leave a message for a callback.

Once a customer service agent is reached, he or she is often unable to provide any more information about a Kraus faucet than is available about the product on the company website.

But, while lacking, customer service is much better than it was a few years ago when it was almost non-existent.

The company is rated A+ on a scale of A+ to F by the Better Business Bureau, a rating that indicates satisfactory responses to consumer complaints made to the BBB and an impressive improvement over its C rating just a few years ago. Kraus is not, however, BBB accredited.

Overall, we like Kraus faucets. Kraus is an importer of some of China's better quality and better-designed faucets which it sells at a fair price. We do not think Kraus offers the best faucets in the world but it doesn't charge "best faucet" prices either. For the prices it does charge, Kraus usually gives its customers a good value.

We would be willing to install a Kraus product as the main faucet in a busy kitchen or bath. But, we would look specifically for a Flühs or Kerox cartridge. The likelihood that Flühs or Kerox cartridges will give you any trouble is reassuringly remote. We would also avoid kitchen faucets with plastic spray heads.

Our one hesitation would be the Kraus warranty. We are not enthusiastic about the skimpy 5-year warranty on cartridges or the skimpier one-year warranty on hoses and spray heads. If this is all the confidence Kraus has in these components, it needs to find manufacturers that can provide better components.

Chinese-made imported faucets comparable in quality and warranty strength to Kraus' products but not necessarily in design or price include:

Most of these companies provide a much better warranty on their faucets.

We are continuing to research the company. If you have experience with Kraus faucets, good, bad, or indifferent, we would like to hear about it, so please contact us or post a comment below.