OEM or generic: what the documents say you are trading

The aftermarket maker says it out loud

That is the clearest statement of the trade available anywhere, and it comes from the party with the least incentive to make it. The generic is a real product from a real manufacturer. It is simply not the OEM's problem if it fails.

The OEM says the reverse, and means it literally

Hayward's exclusion is a blanket void rather than a causation test: Use of a non-genuine Hayward replacement salt chlorination cell on any Hayward automation or chlorination product will void the warranty for that product. That is not damage-caused-by language. Fitting the part is the trigger.

Pentair and CircuPool write theirs as causation instead, excluding damage due to failure to use original replacement parts. Jandy's is more generic again and never mentions cells at all. Three materially different positions, usually reported as one.

The part everyone gets backwards

The aftermarket makers apply the identical rule to their own equipment. CircuPool, APX and Pureline all exclude damage from non-genuine replacement parts in their own warranties. So this is not OEM protectionism against a scrappy aftermarket. It is what every manufacturer in the category says about parts it did not make, including the ones selling you the alternative.

Certification is not the badge argument it looks like

A certifier's listing records a specific holder, a specific model list and a specific scope. NSF's own footnote scopes Hayward cells as certified only for use with Hayward AquaRite, SwimPure, Swim Pure Extreme, Naturesoft and Pro Logic models as specified in manual. Nothing has been evaluated for a non-Hayward cell in a Hayward system, because nobody submitted that combination for evaluation.

The caveat that has to travel with that: NSF/ANSI 50 is a standard, not a certifier. UL and Intertek certify to it as well and publish separately, so absence from one database is not evidence of non-certification, and any page claiming otherwise is making a false claim. What a reader can actually check is whether their exact part number appears in a certifier's database and what the scope line beside it says.

Warranty terms, side by side

Before the money question, one thing about the other side of it. Every aftermarket maker we hold documents for publishes its own warranty schedule, and those schedules are more explicit than the OEM ones rather than less. What each aftermarket maker actually publishes is here.

One aftermarket schedule is worth knowing about in advance, and it is quoted here rather than summarized because the oddity is in the wording itself. This is the residential schedule printed in the CircuPool GEN15 Plus replacement cell user guide, archived 2026-07-25:

Year One - No charge for parts. Year Two - Parts supplied at 50% of base price. Year Three - Parts supplied at 20% of base price.

The owner's share falls as the cell ages instead of rising, which is the reverse of every other schedule in the archive, so a buyer in year two pays more than a buyer in year three. Read the schedule on the document that came with your part, not the headline number on the listing.

Where the price comparison goes

No dollar figures appear here yet. This site publishes dated multi-channel bands rather than live prices, and the first capture has not been taken. A price is the easiest thing on a page like this to get wrong and the fastest to go stale, so it waits for the same treatment as everything else.

Whichever way you go, the listing matters as much as the part. On two of these brands the channel you buy through changes the warranty before the box is even open, and on one of them an internet purchase falls outside it entirely. Two-minute check before you pay.

• The full warranty findings
• Make sure it is actually dead first
• Which cells we track
• What the channel does to your warranty