So, IF heating oil gets cheaper, I turn up the thermostat.
The pellet stove also has a thermostat. So you set it and it turns itself on and off. Just like a furnace.
The first two years I had the pellet stove, pellets would get scarce in the winter. You had to buy ahead in the fall all you needed for the season. Now, the best time to buy it now. Call around and see IF anyone has any left over they are willing to DUMP instead of sitting in their warehouse until October. Many more retailers sell them now.
Pellet stoves do have some moving parts. They do have a board. Which I had to replace once because I didn't have it plugged into a good surge protector. A lightning strike hit near the house and blew the fuse on it. It never worked right after that so I had to replace the board.
The fans are not hard to replace. You just have to pull the thing out of the fireplace. I need my sons help for that. It is on a track with wheels but weighs 450 pounds. I built a wooden platform to slide it out on. My fireplace is on a brick hearth about 10” above the floor. My family room is one large room across the back of my house. My kitchen, dining room and family are all together. The pellet insert is at one end. I use a computer fan to blow the air into the center hallway. Then it goes upstairs by natural convection.
Another benefit is there is no creosote. I clean the flue pipe once a year in October. I have my son help me pull it out of the firebox and clean behind it. There is also a fines box under the auger you have to clean out. It is where the sawdust and broken pellets end up that fall out of the auger. The auger also has a motor to turn it. So, there are actually four motors in my insert.
With my home solar, my maintenance consists of twice per year getting on a ladder with a water hose and a long handle brush to clean them.
My hybrid water heater has a small air filter I have to clean every now and then (I typically do it monthly during allergy seasons in the spring and fall). That's no different than cleaning the lint screen of a clothes dryer.
The main "maintenance" I do is always studying the data export from my inverters, comparing the past week or so's power movements to the same week the prior year, etc. Seeing how much the cost of gasoline is and how much it would have cost to drive my old pickup at 15 mpg instead of the EV, or how much it would have cost a fairly new gas crossover getting maybe 25 mpg if we had gotten one of those instead of the EV crossover.
I then sometimes tweak the inverter settings, most notably the setting on when the inverters power a separate electrical panel that's powered only when my home solar batteries are charged at least X%. I have one of the EV's two chargers on that intermittent electrical panel.
The idea is that if my wife and I come home in the EV with it charged more than enough for the next day, we plug it on the intermittent charger (charge the EV more from it's current state only if there's free power in batteries beyond what the home needs to go through the night without pulling from the grid). Or if we come home needing a charge whether or not the power is free, we plug the EV to the constantly powered charger.
So if we charge the EV up to 80% (the recommended top for local driving) on a sunny day and get 220 to 250 miles range with that, and drive it about 50 miles per day, that's multiple days per row we can have little to no free power (rainy days) before we decide to charge the EV with the constantly powered outlet (which means pulling from the grid if there's not enough free power). That happens sometimes. Or maybe there are days we drive it more (i.e. charging it to 100% for the next day to go on a trip means using the constantly powered cable). But for the most part, we use the charging cable tied to the free power electrical panel. That technique of charging the EV mainly on the free power cable does an amazing job of giving us mostly free miles, which comes out to about 1,300 miles per month (home charged miles, not counting trip miles).