Cygnet Stainless and TruStainless Faucets Review & Rating Updated: January 15, 2024

Imported

China

Alliable, Inc.
Suite B
3845 E Miraloma Ave.
Anaheim, CA 92806
800-339-0238
customersupport@alliableinc.com

Rating

Business Type

Product Range

Kitchen Faucets

Certifications

Brands

Cygnet

Street Price

$229 - $530

Warranty Score

Cartridges & Hoses:

5 years^{1, 2}

Finishes:

None

Leak Free:

10 years^{1, 2}

Spray Heads:

3 years^{1, 2}

Proof of Purchase:

Required

Transferable:

No

Meets U.S. Warranty
Law Requirements

No

1. In relevant part the Cygnet warranty reads as follows:

"Faucets will be leak and drip-free under normal residential use and service period of ten (10) years from the date of original purchase for the faucet and five (5) years from the date of the original purchase for the flexible hose and cartridges and (3) years for spray heads."

If the failure does not cause a leak, the defect is not covered.

2. Faucets must be installed by an "authorized installer" to qualify for warranty protection.

Download/Read/Print the Cygnet warranty.

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Learn more about faucet warranties.

This Company In Brief

Alliable, Inc. (formerly Lion Surfaces, Inc.) is a wholesaler that sells sinks and faucets under the registered Cygnet Stainless^® and TruStainless^® trademarks.

The faucets are made in China by a well-respected manufacturer and are, in our judgment, of above average to very good quality in stainless steel faucets made with top-drzwer components and sold at a fair price.

Our sole issue with the brands is Alliable's woefully deficient warranty. It demonstrates the company's lack of faith in the durability and longevity of its faucets and makes us wonder why the company has so little confidence in the products.

Cygnet and TruStainless faucets are fully certified by the faucet's manufacturer to North American standards.

The Company

Alliable, Inc. was organized in 2007 as Lion Sur­faces, Inc., a California corporation, by Chin W. Kim, its current owner and CEO.

The company describes itself as

"[A] leading manufacturer of specialized goods and services in various industries, including building materials, fabrication tools, safety equipment, and PPE/medical devices."

There is no indication, however, that Alliable is now or ever has been a manufacturer of the products it sells.

Import records show that it is an importer and distributor that started business in 2003 as a countertop company importing countertop materials and specialized adhesives primarily from Lion Chemtech Co., Ltd. in China.

It subsequently expanded into selling stainless steel sinks, made in Korea by Bêkjo (or Baekjo) Sink Co., Ltd. Still later, it began selling stainless steel faucets to complement its sinks.

Since 2018, it has continued to expand and shift its supplier base. While Bêkjo is still a major sink supplier, it now buys more of its stainless steel sinks from Chinese manufacturers.

The company renamed itself from Lion Surfaces to Alliable, Inc. in 2022 to reflect its service to "a diverse variety of industries beyond surfacing."

At present, it sells masks and gloves for medical personnel (Alliable Medical^®), abrasive cloth and sandpaper (World Abrasive^®), adhesives and glues for industrial and commercial use (Artisan Adhesive^®), and sinks and sink components (PerfectFlo^® and Bêkjo^®) along with its stainless steel faucets.

Alliable sells at wholesale from its warehouse in California and at retail through independent dealers, most of which are cabinet or countertop fabricators.

Cygnet Faucet Manufacturing

Cygnet faucets are made in China by Hunan Sento Stainless Steel Sanitary Ware Co., Ltd. (formerly Huangqi Qinglian Machinery Factory) in a facility owned as a joint venture with Changde City Tianlun Precision Casting Co., Ltd.

Sento is a specialized manufacturer of stainless steel sanitary products, including faucets. Founded in 1999 by Kong Qingyi and Shen Zemin, it pioneered the manufacture of faucets from stainless steel in China and claims to be the largest such producer in Asia.

In addition to Alliable's Cygnet and TruStainless brands, Sento faucets are also sold in the U.S. as E₂Stainless by International Concepts in Cabinetry, Inc. and in Canada as Bosco faucets by Bosco Canada, Inc.

All of these companies sell stock faucets from Sento's , so the faucet models sold by each importer greatly overlap.

Cygnet Faucet Materials

Sento faucets are made from SUS304 stainless steel, a japanese-developed alloy that differs slightly from the SS304 stainless more commonly used in kitchen utensils, but the difference is not significant.

Stainless 304 is a "food-grade" stainless that is non-magnetic and resists most chemicals and acids. It comes in two compositions.

A 304 alloy containing 18% chrome and 8% nickel is called 18/8 stainless, and one with 10% nickel is nominated 18/10 stainless.

The 18/8 composition is usually used to make faucets. Sento, however, uses 18/10 stainless, which is a bit stiffer (less likely to bend or dent), less likely to rust, and can also be polished to a glossier shine.

Sento also makes faucets from 316 stainless, an alloy that it uses in its Westeel^®-brand stainless steel products. The alloy adds a little molybdenum to the mix – no more than 2% – for better resistance to acids and salt air.

Often called marine-grade stainlenss, It is preferred by those who live near a seacoast and for specialized faucets used on ships, in chemical laboratories, and in outdoor kitchens.

Sento's 316 stainless faucets, however, are not imported into North America. For 316 stainless faucets, you will need to look at faucets and pay quite a bit more.

Cygnet Faucet Components

Sento uses top-drawer components throughout, including some of the world's best valve cartridges and aerators, two components that are important to a long-lived, leak-free faucet.

Single-handle faucets made by Sento are fitted with mixing cartridges from Kerox Kft, a Hungarian manufacturer that makes only mixing cartridges, and CeramTec cartridges made in Germany, also an excellent cartridge.

CeramTec was a pioneer in technical ceramics in the early 1980s. It developed the standard cartridge designs used by most cartridge manufacturers today. The standardization makes cartridges from most manufacturers interchangeable.

The valve cartridge used in Sento's sole two-handle faucet model for the bath is not identified by the company but appears to be a stem cartridge made by Flühs Drehtechnik, GmbH, a German firm located in Lüdenscheid, Germany since 1926.

Flühs is well-known in the industrial world for its precision machining and is generally thought of as the manufacturer of the world's best single-function stem cartridge. Flühs (sometimes spelled Fluehs for English speakers) valves are heavy-duty products with an established record of excellence.

For more information on faucet cartridges, see Faucet Valves & Cartridges.

The faucets also include Neoperl® aerators.

Faucet aerators used to be simple devices that merely infused a little air to soften the water stream so it would not splash out of the sink. Today, however, they are precision products used to limit water volume to the lower flows required by conservation laws and, in faucets with pull-out sprays, to prevent backflow that could contaminate household drinking water.

It is important, therefore, that this little device, often smaller than a dime, be the best available. And that, almost by definition, is the Swiss-engineered Neoperl® aerator.

Cygnet Faucet Design

Cygnet faucet designs include both contemporary and traditional styles. The angular styling favored in European designs is well represented as are the gentle, sweeping curves of what is generally thought of as American design, a la

There are thirteen kitchen and prep faucets – up from eleven in 2019 – and two lavatory faucets for the bath. Co­ordi­nat­ing soap and lotion dispensers are also available.

Sento designs its own faucets. In addition to its talented in-house staff, the company hires outside designers. The two most notable are from the Scandinavian Modern School, and the Nordic design influence is very evident in the Sento faucet collection. These designers include:

• Jacob Jensen Design, a Scandinavian studio that designed the Phoenix collection for Sento.

The studio was founded in 1958 by Jacob Jensen, a native of Denmark and an award-winning designer of the Scandinavian Modern School known for his starkly minimalism styles. Jensen made major contributions to the genre, designing over 200 products, from watches to kitchen appliances, before his death in 2015.

The studio survives under the direction of Lars Kolund, with design centers in Copenhagen, Bankok, and Shanghai.

• Anders Kristiansson, the co-owner of Revolt Design and Radie Kb in Gothenberg, designed the Sento Lutz collection. 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.

Faucet Designs: For more information on faucet designs, see Faucet Styles & Configurations.

Alliable Business Model

Alliable sells only to the building trades. It does not sell to consumers. Most of the companies it sells to are not resellers. They use the faucets in kitchens and baths that they remodel. Finding a retail source for the faucets can be a problem.

You can buy a Cygnet faucet for your new kitchen or bath, but you must order it through a contractor that is an authorized Alliable buyer. There is no contractor locator on the Alliable website. So, to find a source, you will probably need to telephone Alliable.

TruStainless faucets are sold on Amazon.com, but the selection is severely limited. As of the date of this report, it consisted of one kitchen and one lavatory faucet.

Alliable Website

Navigation on the new Alliable website is menu-driven and largely intuitive. Click on Cyugnet Stainless on the main menu at the top of the homepage to display a drop-down menu, then click on 100% Stainless Steel Faucets to open the faucet listing. Then navigate by clicking on the thumbnails that illustrate the various faucets available.

The site provides almost no information about its faucets, however.

Each faucet is illustrated with a single 3/4 view. Easily displayed multiple views would help a buyer better visualize a faucet.

Better still would be a 360° visualization capability such as that provided by faucets. Click on the 360° icon, and the faucet is displayed in a box that allows you to rotate the faucet with your mouse to view it from any angle.

The same general description of stainless steel faucets is displayed for every Cygnet faucet. Nothing is particularized to specific faucets, not even dimensions.

There are no links to specification sheets, installation instructions, dimensioned drawings, parts lists, or the faucet's warranty – information that is provided on most faucet websites. A link to the faucet warranty is required by federal law.

To get more complete information about Cygnet faucets, we had to go to the Sento website and find the matching faucet – a process made more difficult because Alliable and Sento use different model numbers. However, it is usually possible to identify the matching faucet by appearance.

Alliable's Harwell SB 6074, for example, is on the Sento site as the CS-102 Kitchen Tap. Sento tells us that the cartridge is by Kerox, the aerator and supply hose by Neoperl – still not all the information needed for an informed buying decision, but a lot more than Alliable provides.

We also found the faucet as the as the 200064 on the lBosco website. (See more about Bosco, below). The Bosco site has some basic information about its faucets, including a dimensioned drawing, and a link to installation isntructions.

In our scoring of essential information provided by Alliable on its website, the company failed miserably. (See table at right.)

Download/Read/Print the minimum content required in an online faucet listing to permit an informed buying decision.

The Cygnet Faucet Warranty

The standard North American warranty is a limited lifetime warranty to the original owner, protecting against any failure of materials or workmanship on all mechanical parts, cartridges, and finishes for as long as the original buyer owns the faucet.

Warranty Deficiencies

Compared to the standard, the Cygnet warranty is very deficient.

Its caption describes it as a "Lifetime Limited Warranty." But, in fact, it is no more than a ten-year warranty. According to the text of the warranty, no faucet component is guaranteed for longer than ten years, and the most critical components for as little as three years.

It does not cover all failures of materials or workmanship. It covers only those failures that cause a leak.

A lot of things that can go wrong with a faucet that do not cause it to leak: a loose handle that cannot be tightened, a spray latch that refuses to latch, or a swivel that does not swivel, are examples. These are rare defects, but they do happen.

The ten-year period applies only to the parts of the faucet that almost never leak: the body, the spout, the handle, and so on. The spout or body, for example, could cause a leak only if it split open – an occurence so rare that we have not even heard of it happening in the half century we have been in the remodeling business.

The components that are most likely to leak have a much shorter warranty period: 5 years on cartridges and hoses and 3 years on spray heads. There is no warranty at all on cosmetic defects (surface discoloration or rust, for example).

For the warranty to be valid, the faucet has to be installed by an "authorized installer." What constitutes an authorized installer is never explained.

Cygnet's warranty, in our estimation, is considerably less than a true ten-year warranty, and we don't consider it much of a guarantee. We have never seen such a short-term warranty on Kerox or Ceramtec cartridges from the dozens of faucet brands we have reviewed that use the cartridges. It suggests a woeful lack of confidence by management in the durability and longevity of Cygnet faucets.

A company's warranty is a good indicator of management's assessment of the quality of its products. Alliable can advertise its faucets in glowing terms, promoting them as "designed to endure and perform," but its real opinion about the quality and longevity of its faucets is in its warranty. Evidently, Alliable does not expect the faucets to "endure" for more than ten years and to "perform" much less reliably than faucets of similar quality.

Promotional puffery costs nothing, but a warranty requires the company to pledge its hard-earned dollars. Most companies that sell good-quality faucets are willing to risk their warranty dollars for a lifetime. Not Alliable. It is willing to risk its dollars for no more than three to five years, and then only if the faucet leaks.

If these are such great faucets, why not a stronger warranty?

The fact is, we don't know. We did not find any obvious reasons for the company's apparent lack of confidence. The faucets seem to be well-crafted and fitted with top-quality components. But if Alliable believes that its Cygnet faucet spray heads will last just three years and its ceramic cartridges and hoses a mere five, then you might want to consider taking it at its word.

Violations of Federal Warranty Law

In addition to its basic deficiencies as a warranty, the Cygnet warranty also violates several sections of 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. Heare are the most egegious:

• Mag­nu­son-Moss requires a written warranty to provide a "clear description and identification of products, or parts, or characteristics, or components or properties" (16 CFR § 701.3(a)(2)). Certain ambiguous terms, such as "authorized installer," that have no common meaning as applied to faucets must be explained.

  Here is another provision that baffled all of the lawyers that read it:

  "The Cygnet Stainless warranty is a comprehensive and explicit limit of liability and all items outside of it are not addressable by or the responsibility of Cygnet Stainless. Certain states have variances regarding implied warranties and in those situations we remain fully compliant."

  This sounds vaguely official and somewhat lawyerly, but it is really just nonsense.

• The Cygnet warranty claims that

  "This warranty supersedes all other warranties, expressed or implied."

  However, under Mag­nu­son-Moss, state law implied warranties of merchatability and fitness for purpose are sacrosanct. They cannot be replaced or superseded. 16 CFR § 701.3(a)(7))

• The Cygnet warranty attempts to avoid any liability for consequential or incidental damages with this provision:

  "By the purchase and use of our products, you agree that Cygnet Stainless is not liable for incidental, consequential, or special damages associated with the return, replacement, installation or use of your products."

  Mag­nu­son-Moss permits companies to decline to cover consequential and incidental damages, but any such disclaimer must identify the specific laws to be avoided (which this wording does not) and be accompanied by the following advisory: (16 CFR § 701.3(8))

  "Some states do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you."

  Without the required clarification, any attempt at disclaiming consequential and incidental damages is void and has no effect.

• A written warranty may not indicate, directly or by implication, that "the decision of the warrantor … is final or binding in any dispute concerning the warranty … [or] that [the company] alone shall determine what is a defect under the agreement." (16 CFR § 700.8)

  Any such statement is considered "deceptive or misleading" and is void. Consequently, this statement in the Cygnet warranty,

  "Cygnet Stainless reserves the right to inspect any faucet reported to be defective prior to replacements of the faucet. All decisions are final."

  is void to the extent it claims or implies that the company has the final word on whether a fault in the faucet that falls under the warranty has occurred.

• Every consumer product must include the following statement which is required to be in every consumer warranty: (16 CFR § 701.3(9))

  "This warranty gives you specific legal rights, and you may also have other rights which vary from state to state"

  This statement is missing in the Cygnet warranty. There seems to be no cure for this omission. Most likely, a court would find the entire warranty void and without effect, eliminating its many restrictions and limitations, and place any warranty claim squarely within the ambit of state law warranties, much to the advantage of the customer.

A warranty is an important legal document that can get a company into a lot of trouble if it is not clearly drafted and fully compliant with state and federal warranty law.

Cygnet's warranty is incredibly poorly written. It is jumbled, confusing, and has little semblance of a logical order. Unrelated provisions are shoehorned into the same paragraph. Related provisions are widely separated. Legal terminology is used incorrectly. oftn to such an extent that sections of the warranty make no legal sense at all.

It very badly needs to be rewritten by a lawyer familiar with warranty law.

Testing & Certification

Cygnet Certifications

TruStainless Certifications

Keeping Faucets Safe: For more information on safety and reliability standards for faucets and how the industry is regulated, see Keeping Faucets Safe & Reliable.

Other Sources of Sento Faucets

A few Sento faucets are sold by Alliable on Amazon.com under the TreStainless brand. The selection is very limited.

Other sources of Sento stainless steel faucets, including models not sold by Cygnet, marketed under other brands, include the following:

• E₂Stainless faucets: These are Sento faucets distributed by International Concepts in Cabinetry, Inc. The company does not sell faucets at retail, but they are available through some of its dealers. Unfortunately the ICIC website does not have a Where to Buy link identifying its dealers. But we found two of them:
• Lakeside Suarfaces, Inc., sells E₂Stainless faucets and is willing to sel them without their being a part of a kithen or bath remodel. The company can be reached at 231-246-2220 or by email at galleries@lakesideinc.com.
• Grillscapes, is another dealer. It can be reached at 800-311-4356 or by email at sales@grillscapes.com.
Expect to pay a little more for E₂Stainless faucets. The warranty provided by E₂ Stainless is a somewhat stronger than the Cygnet warranty, but not by much.
• Bosco Faucets: Bosco Canada, Inc. is a wholesaler and distributor. It does not sell its Bosco-branded Sento faucets at retail, but a list of the brick-and-mortar retailers that sell directly to consumers is available on its website. Just click the "Where to Buy" tab on the main menu.
• Bosco, unlike Cygnet and E₂Stainless sells Sento faucet in finishes other than stainless steel. Sento offers six finishes: Brushed Gold, Brushed Rose Gold, Gunmetal, Brushed Stainless, Matte Black, and Mirror Polished. Cygnet and E₂Stainless sell only the Stainless finish. Bosco offers its Sento faucets in Brushed Gold, Matte Black, and Mirror Polished as well as Stainless.
• Unfortunately for U.S. buyers, Sento faucets from Bosco are available only in Canada. But, if you have a cousin in Montreal, maybe you can work a deal.

Many other faucet companies also sell stainless steel faucets. Some of these brands are:

Not all of the faucets sold under these brands are stainless, but at least some are. Almost all have a stronger warranty – most a lifetime warranty – but most are also priced higher on average.

Conclusions

From our inspection and testing of Cygnet faucets, we believe they are well-designed and well-crafted stainless faucets made of good-quality steel using very good components throughout. For the price, they may be a steal, possibly the best value in a stainless faucet on the market today.

The faucets come with some drawbacks, however, including an anemic, largely incomprehensible warranty, and buying one may require you to first research which contractors in your area have the faucets for sale. Since the new Alliable website does not have a "where to buy" feature, finding out where to buy may require a little sleuthing.

Most of our rating panel scored the faucets "Would not buy," with a minority scoring them "Would buy with reservations." Asked to score them assuming a lifetime warranty similar to our Model Limited Lifetime Warranty, the panel rated them "Would buy" and "Would buy without hesitation."

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