Yosemite Faucets Review & Rating Updated:December 2, 2023
trading as
Yosemite Home Decor
4250 West Shaw Ave.
Fresno, CA 93722
(800) 305-9872
Law Requirements
Warranty Footnotes:
1. At the top of the warranty guarantees the faucets for a "lifetime", a term that is not defined. Two paragraphs later it gurarantees the faucet "the faucet against defects in material and workmanship fora period of ten (10) years …"Download/Print the Yosemite faucet warranty.Learn more about faucet warranties.
This Company In Brief
Yosemite is a brand of imported Chinese faucets distributed by Northern Central Distributing, Inc. of Fresno, California.
The faucets are typical Chinese designs of no particular distinction and of average quality or a little better.
They are not, in the opinion of our evaluators, suitable for long-term use in a busy kitchen or main bath but may be installed in a little-used guest powder room or prep sink where the price is a major consideration and robust, long-term durability is not a concern.
Notice: We believe that Northern Central Distributing has ceased selling faucets. Its website no longer shows faucets for sale, and many of its retail outlets show Yosemite faucets as "discontinued." We do not know, however, whether this is a temporary pause or a permanent cessation.
Northern Central Distributing, Inc. (NCD) is an importer of Chinese-made faucets that it sells in internet venues and at its retail store in Fresno, California. wares.
The company was formed in 1986 by Rockie Bogenschutz to sell zero-clearance gas fireplaces, primarily to home builders. Subsequently, Mr. Bogenschutz partnered with Farshid Assemi and added household appliances to the company's wares.
In 2006 the company further expanded its wares, delving into lighting, fireplace mantels, and home decor items. wares.
It registered Yosemite Home Decor
as a service mark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2006 but the registration was canceled in 2014 for failure to file a "continued use" declaration stating that the name was still being used in commerce. wares.
NCD still owns the name as a common law trademark, it just cannot claim that the name is registered or use the ®
symbol with the mark.
The company regularly trades as Central Distributing, a name frequently used in its literature and on the signage outside its office/warehouse in Fresno. This trade name, as far as we can determine, has never been registered.
According to its various trademark applications, the company sells
pergolas, fireplace mantels, hearth products; granite sinks, water fountains, and countertops; bathwares including faucets, sinks, and toilets; lighting fixtures, electric luminaries, ceiling fans, and lamps; cabinets, including bathroom vanities, kitchen cabinets, and medicine cabinets; chairs, benches, wine racks, and decorative accent pieces including wall art, clocks, vases, statutes, and mirrors; outdoor furniture, bamboo huts, planters, and flower pots.
Yosemite continues to sell appliances along with lighting, fireplaces, and home decor products out of its large retail store in the Highway City district on the west side of Fresno, California.
It also sells just about the same wares (excluding appliances) through a large number of internet retailers such as Amazon and Wayfair as well as through brick and mortar retailers such as Walmart, Home Depot and even Target.
Most of its merchandise is imported from China, the rest in other parts of Asia. The company does an impressive volume. We tracked over 82 large shipments from various Asian suppliers in just the past twelve months.
Faucets are just a tiny portion of its sales. In fact, of the 82 or so shipments received from Asia in the past year, only 6 were from faucet suppliers.
Nonetheless, due to a sweeping exposure on the internet, Yosemite faucets are widely available and have generated dozens of inquiries over the past year.
The company's faucet supplier is Kaiping Promise Plumbing Co. Ltd., an faucet manufacturer that sells its own Promise brand of faucets throughout Asia.
Four years ago the Yosemite was also buying faucets from Kaiping Freendo Sanitary Ware Co Ltd., also an manufacturer that is a part of the giant Huayi Group that includes Huayi Plumbing Fittings Industry, Co., Ltd., of Guangdong and Kaiping Euopea Plumbing Apparatus Co., Ltd. In the intervening months, however, Yosemite has drastically cut back on the number of faucets it sells and has ceased buying from Freendo.
Yosemite faucets are off-the-shelf items straight out of its manufacturer's and are neither designed nor manufactured expressly for Yosemite. Many of the faucets sold by Yosemite are also sold by other vendors in North America.
Kaiping Promise is a supplier to Elkay Manufacturing's subsidiary
With so much overlap, it should be no surprise that many Yosemite faucets are also sold by other companies. The Yosemite YP82VFB (shown above), for example, is manufactured by Kaiping Promise as the Promise 8211B lavatory faucet.
Yosemite prices are comparable to similar faucets sold by other importers of Chinese-made faucets (See list below). But, most of its competition sells fully certified faucets that are, in many instances, backed by a lifetime product warranty.
You may pay less for a Yosemite faucet but you may be getting a faucet that is not legal to install in North America and you are certainly getting one that is guaranteed for just ten years.
The faucets are Chinese designs — stylish but by no means extraordinary.
Chinese designs are rarely cutting edge. They tend to be middle-of-the-road. The goal of Chinese faucet manufacturers is to sell as many faucets as possible, which means keeping their designs well within the mainline to appeal to as many potential buyers as possible.
Few design breakthroughs take place in China. While Asian designers are getting bolder and some are attracting attention by winning awards in international design competitions, Chinese designs are still largely adopted from Europe and the U.S. It does not take long for a design that sells well in these major markets to be imitated by Asian factories. The lag time is usually 3 to 5 years, by which time, of course, new designs are no longer particularly new.
The mechanics of Yosemite faucets are about average or a little below. While the faucet bodies are typically all brass, handles are often the less expensive zinc or a zinc/aluminum alloy.
One of Yosemite's suppliers, Kaiping Promise, advertises that its faucet waterways are all low-lead brass but that parts not in the waterway, including handles and escutcheon plates, are often less expensive metals or even plastic.
The ceramic cartridges in the Yosemite faucets we examined were Chinese but not marked with a manufacturer's stamp.
China has some very good technical ceramics manufacturers that have gained a worldwide reputation for quality cartridges. Most of these proudly place a maker's mark on their cartridges.
The fact that these cartridges have no mark strongly suggests that they are probably not from one of these first rank manufacturers.
All Yosemite faucets are available in bright chrome, some are available in brushed nickel and "oil-rubbed" bronze. These appear to be the only finishes available.
The Yosemite website is well-organized, with intuitive navigation and a product search function that is easy to use and accurate.
Some faucets have what is called a "Spec Sheet/Manual" online, and some do not. The information provided in the spec sheet includes a faucet's available finishes, flow rate, and standards to which the faucet is certified (more about this below), and installation instructions.
They typically do not provide other information that would be useful to a buying decision including spout reach and height, cartridge type and manufacturer, a scaled drawing, and a parts diagram. Spec sheets, for those faucets that have them, are downloadable in Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf) format.
The Yosemite faucet warranty is for 10 years on "all components which make the product operational." The warranty promises to "repair or replace the product or components necessary to restore the product to good working condition."
However, it does not cover purely cosmetic defects such as problems with faucet finishes, and it does not cover the cost of shipping replacements. The customer is expected to pay for shipping – how penny-pinching is that?
Yosemite Warranty
Legal Issues"
It is clear from Yosemite's warranty that whoever wrote the warranty had was not aware of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (15 U.S.C. §2301) enacted in 1975 and now in force for years. Every warranty writer should have a least a passing acquaintance with this law.
The Act specifies the minimum legal requirements for consumer product warranties in the U.S. Yosemite's warranty contains so many legal defects that a full list is impossible here. Two, however, stand out: improper captioning and an invalid attempt to exclude consequential and incidental damages from warranty coverage.
Although the text of the Yosemite warranty describes it as a "limited" warranty, the caption or title of the warranty is "Warranty Information". Magnuson-Moss requires a consumer limited product warranty caption to contain the word "Limited". Any warranty not captioned with some acceptable version of "Limited Waranty" is automatically a full warranty (15 U.S.C. §2303(a), 16 CFR §700.6)) irrespective of any actual intent of the company.
A full warranty gives the consumer many more rights than a limited warranty, voiding many of the restrictive provisions written into the Yosemite warranty that seek to narrow a faucet owner's recovery of labor costs, shipping, and incidental and consequential damages resulting from a faucet failure.
For more on interpreting faucet warranties, see Understanding Faucet Warranties.
Most of the restrictions written into the warranty would be found invalid in any legal challenge because the warranty does not contain the required language that qualifies the restrictions. For example, Yosemite claims that its "warranty does not allow recovery of incidental or consequential damages such as loss of use, delay, property damage or other consequential damage, and Yosemite Home Décor accepts no liability for such damages."
Companies are permitted by Magnuson-Moss to deny coverage for these sorts of damages, but only if the warranty includes the following required statement:
"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."
Since the Yosemite warranty lacks the statement, its attempt to exclude consequential and incidental damages, including labor charges, fails and would not be upheld by any court. Moreover, in any legal challenge, Northern Central Distributing would be required to pay the challenger's costs, including attorney fees.
Consequential and incidental damages are those other than the defect in the faucet itself. For example, your BWE faucet leaks and damages your cabinets. The leak is a "direct damage" to the faucet. The damage to the cabinets is a "consequential damage". If you need to hire a lawyer to take your case to court, the attorney's fees are an "incidental damage". Collectively, consequential and incidental damages are called "indirect" or "special" damages;
Its warranty is a very reliable indicator of how much confidence a company actually has in its faucets.
A faucet company can gush ad nauseam in its advertising about its fabulous finishes, its reliable cartridges, and its durable all-brass faucets, but its true opinion about its faucets can be found in its warranty.
Companies that believe their faucets are reliable with long-lasting cartridges and robust finishes tend to provide generous, long-term warranties. Companies that fear the consequences of what they believe are fragile finishes, short-lived cartridges, and unreliable faucets tend to provide short-term, restrictive warranties.
There are some exceptions, but generally, the length of a warranty is just as long as the company believes its faucets will survive without failing. A 10-year warranty indicates an expected ten-year faucet life.
Yosemite's warranty indicates a lack of confidence by Yosemite in the durability or longevity of its faucets. We're not sure what the problem is. But, Yosemite management has inside information that we don't and may know something about the company's faucets that we may never find out. So, if Yosemite believes its faucets will last just 10 years, then so do we.
Northern Central Distributing has a good record for handling post-sale customer issues and warranty claims.
It has earned a rating of A+ on a scale of A+ to F from the Better Business Bureau for having had no consumer complaints in three years. Central Distributing has been accredited by the BBB since December 6, 1996.
In our customer service and technical support tests, the company failed technical knowledge but passed everything else.
Customer service agents knew very little about faucets and were unable to help solve our (purely imaginary) faucet installation issues but when it came to handling our (again, purely imaginary) warranty claim, the process was fast and efficient. The company scored 3.6 out of 5 possible points. Anything below 4.0 is not acceptable.
Faucets are strictly regulated products.
All plumbing codes in effect in North America require faucets to meet certain minimum standards. These standards and the tests to be used to confirm compliance with the standards are set out in ASME A112.18.1/CSA B125.1 which establishes the joint U.S.-Canadian requirements for the safety, integrity, and reliability of faucets, and ANSI/NSF 61/9 which specifies the North American "lead-free" standards the health safety standards for faucets installed in drinking water systems.
After years of selling uncertified faucets and lying about it, even going so far as to alter and forge certificates to make it appear as though its faucets were certified, Yosemite finally decided to certify some of its faucets in 2020, then allowed the certifications to lapse. It faucets are not certified.
The California Energy Commission sued Yosemite Home Decor for illegally selling unapproved faucets in California from uly 1, 2015, to June 18, 2020. The company paid a penalty of $8,295.00 to settle the suit in 2021.
Chinese- and Taiwanese-made faucets comparable to those sold by Yosemite include:
There is no reason to buy Yosemite faucets. They are not particularly stylish. They are of no better than slightly above average quality. They are not especially inexpensive, and many if not most of them are not certified to U.S. standards and may not be legally installed in a drinking water system in the U.S. or Canada.
We are continuing to research the company. If you have experience with Yosemite faucets, good, bad, or indifferent, we would like to hear about it, so please contact us or post a comment below.