We need to talk about this. One of the reasons people go through all of the ISO registration stuff in the first place is to lower the consumer’s risk. When a consumer buys a article or does a service, he or she benefits from some assurance from a third party that it is all legal and meets safety and performance standards.

So, there is some incentive for this system to have some integrity. Anybody that has been around any of my audits knows that I do take this seriously.

But, there is a powerful motivation for this system to have some lack of integrity. I found a case not too long ago without working too hard at it.

The Object in Question

You can order this Pretty Faucet on Amazon dot com. I shopped for one of these the other day. This one is about $70, but the Kohler version of similar design and function is more like $250.

The website does mention the company’s certification, You click the link and you end up on a page with a lot of certificates. Beelee certificate link.

Expired ISO Certificates

These things are posted small enough that you have to look closely to tell, but there are two ISO9001 certificates on here that are both expired. One of them is as old as 2007 and reflects the 2000 standard.

It is not terribly uncommon for a company to get lazy and not update their website. But, this in and of itself is a non-conformance. The auditor should be checking this during their audits. Nevertheless, this is Problem #1. Expired Certificates posted online.

But if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, there is a way to see if they are innocently lazy or misrepresenting. You can get on the registrar’s website and look up the company and determine if they have a current certificate.

The Registrars

This particular company is, or was, certified through something called ICAS which come to find out is a certifying body in China. So we can look up two things: Is the registrar themselves legitimate, and, is the company currently registered?

The first one was the easier of the two in this case, the registrar themselves has to be accredited through a higher level organization. In this case ICAS has a valid certificate with UKAS, which is the main certifying body in the UK, and are considered pretty good.

ICAS does have a database of their current certificates, and the search using the current company name as found on the website and/or the expired certificates turned up a big nothing. I am ready to say that ICAS at the very minimum is doing their job of occasionally flunking someone.

But, no certificate for Wenzhou Bela. The evidence is building. This is Problem #2

The Watermark Certificate

So if these characters are making fake claims that they are registered to ISO, what of the other certs?

SAI Global has something called the Watermark Certificate. This is required for the plumbing part to be installed in Australia.

You have to increase the size of this to read it, but this certificate is also expired.

SAI Global is a reputable outfit, and it is easy enough to look at the company’s database of Watermark certificates and see if the manufacturer or parts are registered. In this case, the fixture is listed by model number.

Problem #3 is that the model number of the faucet in question is not on the SAI database anywhere. I guess we can make another generous assumption that the Wenzhou Lerba Bathroom Products company is the same as the Wenzhou Bela company, since they have roughly the same address. But, the expired certificates are not in alignment with the database regarding the company name or anything that is traceable back to the product. That is Problem #4.

The NSF Certificate

The NSF is the National Sanitation Foundation. Someone needs the NSF cert in order for a faucet to be legally attached to the plumbing supply of a residence in the US. The rationale for this is beautifully explained in the NSF website.

No problem to do a database search of the very reputable NSF. When we do, there is a reference to Wenzhou Runxin company who makes water softeners, but nothing about our nice little faucets. Problem #5.

The CE Mark

The CE mark is a registration that is required to sell certain types of products in Europe. Here is the link to Wenzhou Bela’s page on AliBaba.

They do post this certificate from SGS giving the CE mark certification. SGS is another very well thought of global company. No problem to look on their database for any of this.

Well, actually, there is a problem. There is not a link to the actual certificate, only to this photo, which is nice and grayed out. You can’t, using this information, look the certificate up on the SGS database. If I am not mistaken, this is also model-specific. We might get lucky and find the company in the SGS database, but it is looking iffy that we will find the actual model of our pretty faucet.

Problem #6 not posting the information with the registrar and the certificate number in such a way that some reasonably motivated person can trace it from the cert to the product.

Why is all of this important?

For one thing, as it applies to the US, and the NSF: NSF tests these things individually to confirm that they are not putting lead and cadmium into the drinking water supply. Therefore, in most jurisdictions, it is a code violation i.e. “illegal” to install one of these things in a place without the cert.

Does that mean that someone with a plumbing merit badge and a wrench like me can do it him or herself? I suppose if I want to accept the risk that these pretty faucets are safe, I might do that. But if it ever got to the point where I was inspected by some authority figure, I would presumably need to provide evidence of certification. I believe the licensed contractors must do this on new construction, but there is a lot of question as to whether the local building inspectors are sharp enough to have picked up on this. Also once it is installed, and the house is bought and sold a few times, who has the original cert?

Also the NSF does have some testing for functionality. Based on the reviews of this product, about 1 out of 8 of these things leaks. I suppose you are accepting that risk too.

Possibly Innocent Explanation

I suppose that if you were to ask the company, they would say “oh, we are so sorry, our website designer is just too busy to have updated this page in the last 12 years”. Also, these certificates show up on Ali Baba and several other websites and I suppose it is difficult to change them all.

Also I think what is happening is that the Wenzhou Lerbu, Wenzhou Bela, Wenzho Roizin and all the other Wenzho-based plumbing companies are all just trading companies. They open up and close down all the time. This could, possibly, mean that the brains of the gang over there is some central organization that is certified, nice and safe, and everything is wonderful. “Oh, we are a new trading company, we haven’t yet got our new certificate, but of course the parent company is registered.” These “trading companies” are people putting ads on the internet and running phones in the back of a building somewhere. My guess is they have no idea about codes or anything else. They are worker bees over there someplace.

Or, on the basis of the above 6 problems (plus a couple of others I haven’t told you about) there is also some risk that the company is sleazy, and using the mark fraudulently. They do know what they are doing. They are posting just enough information to satisfy you just enough without going through the expense of certification.

What can be done about any of this?

I suppose you could just not buy it.

A further recourse is to send a copy of this blog post to Amazon.com, who is the ostensible organization responsible for selling these.

I would love for you to do that because I need the traffic.

They will tell you that there is a long, convoluted supply chain that runs from Wenzhou to New Jersey, to the Amazon reseller, and all they are is a communications company. They do not take ownership of anything they have on their website.

We could, I guess, send a copy of this to the NSF, SAI, SGS and the reputable global people and see what happens. That might get some results.

If this was not quite so boring a topic, 60-minutes might pick it up. Your local county inspector might benefit from this post from an educational standpoint. His or her eyes are probably glazed over by this time, if he or she read this.

The Can of Worms

If Amazon dot com allows the selling of sleazy faucets, and on the very same page they are advertising their Pill Pack program which is a giant pharmacy in the sky to sell you medications, who is to say the same thing would not happen with medications?

Knowing what you do now, do you want to order meds from these guys?

Side Point

Here is my certification that says I am a Qualification-Based Lead Auditor. I spent several dollars and a lot of drainage of my life force to pay for this. Feel free to look it up on the Exemplar Global website. My number is 105245. Tell them I said “hi”. I am good for at least another year. Exemplar Global is annoyingly inefficient but they are globally accepted.

Come to find out, in addition to audits in some little machine shop somewhere, sometimes my job is important.

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