How much money does electronic (intermittent pilot) ignition save compared to a standing pilot?

Where the savings actually come from

A standing pilot is a small flame that burns 24 hours a day, every day, whether you use the fireplace or not. In heating season that's tolerable — some of that heat even lands in the room. The waste is the off-season: seven-plus months of a flame burning for nobody. Intermittent pilot ignition (IPI) sparks the pilot electronically only when you call for flame, so the off-season waste simply disappears. Over a full year the savings are real; per month in winter, you'd barely notice.

The outage tradeoff Helene taught us

Here's the part the brochure glosses over. A standing-pilot millivolt fireplace — the Valor H5 is our flagship example — generates its own tiny electrical signal from the pilot flame. No circuit board, no wall power, nothing to fail. When Helene took the grid down across WNC for days, those were the fireplaces that just kept burning. A standard IPI unit needs electricity to spark, which means it's dark exactly when you want it most — unless it carries battery backup, the way Napoleon's ignition systems do.

So the honest framing isn't "IPI saves money, buy IPI." It's: do you value a slightly lower gas bill, or heat that ignores the grid? Plenty of our mountain customers deliberately choose the standing pilot and consider the pilot gas cheap insurance. Our [backup heat guide](/guides/backup-heat-power-outage-wnc) digs deeper.

The free middle path

Own a standing-pilot unit already? Turn the pilot off each spring and you've captured most of IPI's savings for nothing. One catch: an idle pilot assembly is where spiders and dust settle over the off-season — the classic WNC no-light call every October. A fall tune-up (from $189) relights it, cleans the assembly, and has you ready before the first cold snap. Call (828) 545-0525 to get on the calendar.