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Should you run a pellet stove continuously?

In most cases, yes: a pellet stove is built to hold a temperature for hours on end, and every ignition puts wear on one part in particular, the igniter, that continuous running spares. But "continuous" doesn't say how the stove holds that temperature once the room is warm. There are three ways to do it, and they don't give you the same comfort or the same number of restarts.

What does a pellet stove do once the room is up to temperature?

Depending on how it's set, your stove follows one of three logics:

• No eco mode: it turns the power down as the room nears your target, but doesn't stop on its own in normal running. This is true continuous operation.
• With the stove's own eco mode: it cuts out once the room passes one threshold, and relights once it falls below another. Both thresholds are fixed. On some stoves, including those with Fumis electronics, it keeps heating at the power you set until that point; others drop to minimum power first before cutting out.
• With controlled modulation, like Eco+ in Flam: the flame drops level by level as the room nears your target, and the stove only cuts out if the room was about to leave the margin you chose.

Does frequent relighting wear out the stove?

Yes, and that's the main argument for leaving it running. The igniter is the heating element that lights the first pellets: it heats up at every start, and eventually needs replacing. The ignition phase is also the dirtiest: until the flame is stable, combustion leaves more soot on the firebox and the glass.

An ignition doesn't warm the room straight away either. The stove needs time to reach full running speed, then the room needs time to feel it. The reverse is also true: a stove doesn't stop dead. The heat stored in its mass keeps spreading. On the stove we've been monitoring since February 2026, the room still gains a median 0.6°C, over about 70 minutes, after the flame stops (71 stops measured). Cutting out exactly at your target therefore ends up overshooting it.

Running at low power all the time: what you gain, what you lose

Without an eco mode, you avoid almost every relight, and the temperature stays stable as long as the weather outside doesn't change.

The trade-off: the stove keeps burning pellets when the room no longer needs it. On a mild or sunny afternoon, the room climbs above your target and the stove keeps burning, just gently. We don't publish any consumption figure for this mode: we haven't measured it, and it depends mostly on your home.

The stove's eco mode: cutting out and relighting at fixed thresholds

The stove's built-in eco mode answers this by cutting the flame. The room then moves in waves: it climbs to the top threshold, inertia pushes it a little further up, then it falls back to the bottom threshold before the stove starts again, and takes time to climb back. How often it relights depends on the gap between the two thresholds and on how fast your home cools down.

It's a solid baseline, and it costs nothing: if your stove supports it, Flam switches it on from the app, with no subscription. Its limit is that it's blind: the thresholds are the same on a freezing night and on a mild afternoon, and the stove doesn't factor in inertia before it cuts out.

Modulating the flame instead of cutting out: what our simulations show

Eco+ replaces those fixed thresholds with a decision made at every reading. It varies the power across the stove's five levels: strong when the room is cold, gentle as it nears your target. If it has to cut out, it does so with inertia in mind, before the room goes past the margin you chose. That margin is adjustable: ± 0.75°C on Comfort, ± 1°C on Balanced (the default setting), ± 1.5°C on Economical.

To compare the methods without depending on one particular winter, we replayed the same heating season, 43 days from late winter 2026, on a simulated home calibrated against a real stove's readings. Same home, same weather, same target: only the way the temperature is held changes. The chart below shows two days of it.

Across the whole simulated season:

• Time spent within half a degree of the target: 42% with the stove's eco mode; with Eco+, 50% on Balanced and 38% on Economical.
• Ignitions per day: 1.3 with the stove's eco mode; with Eco+, 1.7 on Balanced, 1.1 on Economical, and about 2 on Comfort.
• Pellets: on the tightest setting, Eco+ burned about 11% more than the stove's eco mode. We don't have a figure for the other settings.

The honest reading is this. Eco+ isn't a way to burn fewer pellets: on its tightest setting, it spends more pellets to hold the room closer to your target. Depending on the setting, you get a steadier temperature (Comfort) or fewer ignitions (Economical). On Balanced, the default setting, the room is steadier than with the stove's eco mode, but the stove relights more often. On Economical, the room is a little less steady than with the stove's eco mode, but the stove starts up less often.

These figures describe a single home. A better-insulated house, or a room that gets more sun, will give different values: it's the gap between the methods that matters, not the exact number.

Should you switch off a pellet stove at night?

It all depends on how fast your home loses its heat. On the one we're monitoring, the room loses about 0.2°C an hour once the stove is off and its heat has dissipated. Every home is different, but a properly insulated one doesn't empty out in a single night.

• A home that holds its heat well: switching off at night and relighting in the morning costs a single ignition, and you avoid heating rooms nobody is in.
• A home that cools quickly: a lower night-time temperature, kept up by the stove, avoids waking up cold and a long catch-up first thing in the morning.
• Away for several days: switch off, or keep a reduced temperature if frost is on the way.

The real problem with mornings is the lag. A stove lit at 7am doesn't heat a room for 7am. With a timer, you have to guess the ignition time, and it isn't the same on a mild night and on a freezing one. That's what Flam Pilot tries to work out for you: you give it a temperature and a time, and, with Eco+, it picks the ignition time from the outdoor temperature and your home's inertia, which it learns as it goes. If it expects to run late, it warns you.

In short

• You're home all day: leave it running. The stove's eco mode avoids heating for nothing; Eco+, on Comfort or Balanced, keeps the room steadier.
• You want fewer starts: leave it running with no eco mode if consumption comes second; otherwise, choose the stove's eco mode with a wide margin, or Eco+ on Economical.
• You're out for the day or the night: switch off, and have the stove relight early enough for when you're back.

The stove's eco mode and the weekly schedule are free in Flam. Eco+ and Flam Pilot are part of Flam+, which can be tried for 10 days, no payment card required.