Heta Inspire Review

The Heta Inspire has become the industries stove to beat. Just before covid my father went to visit several manufacturers at Christmas to say thank you for their help during the year and to give a few friends and colleagues a bottle of wine. Being the man he is, he always gets into conversation with members of the team and ended up visiting the R & D department of several of these manufacturers. Each time he noticed one similarity with each manufacturer, they all had a Heta Inspire 45. Fast forward to today and several similar appliances now exist with certain similarities to a stove I'm very fond of. It comes with a stay cool stainless steel handle that you can actually hold whilst the stove is at full temperature. It also has a petal grate (a grate that opens and closes and is focused on wood) and an ash pan, a tool for the ash pan and a very smart Heta glove. It is built from the ground up in Denmark and has a huge piece of glass.

They make it in 6 versions:

Heta Inspire 40

Heta Inspire 40H (with log store)

Heta Inspire 45

Heta Inspire 45H (with log store)

Heta Inspire 55

Heta Inspire 55H (with log store)

And the 45 version also has an optional soapstone top, and the 55 has an optional cooking plate on the top.

Lighting the stove: 7/10

Lighting is nice and easy, just open that petal grate, leave the door ajar, follow the instructions and away it goes.

Cleanness: 9/10

Like all stoves you need dry fuel and if you remove the DEFRA kit, it's so controllable that you will need some practice to ensure you don't get the glass black by closing it down too far. Get used to it and you'll find it is an exceptionally clean running stove. Obviously a stove of this quality also runs at very high efficiency and comes with all the ticks in the relevant "clean stove" boxes.

Controls: 10/10

The door handle is engineered perfectly and clunks closed in a way that lets you know "this is no ordinary stove". The main air slider is perfectly damped and best of all never squeaked or scratched even after 2 years of hard use by me. It just slides open and closed with ease and it doesn't rattle or come loose either. The ash pan and handle works well, but is relatively ordinary. And finally the controllability is a bit split, if the DEFRA kit is installed the stove works beautifully still and does control enough to get the stove to run overnight on wood, but it's not in anyway exceptional. It achieves an overnight burn because the rest of the design is so good, but the control is a little lacking. If however you don't live in a smokeless zone and can remove the DEFRA kit, you have the full range of control and a stove that will do exactly what is asked and without a seconds delay. As you can see in the video (below) the control is so good that you can literally put the stove out with one flick of the control.

Fuel economy: 10/10

For a stove that has a grate and an ash pan it's fuel economy makes no sense, normally raising wood up on top of a grate would dramatically increase a stoves wood consumption, but here it doesn't. It can run overnight on as little as 2 logs and all day on a basket, and then something you can only know by using it, but it's the difference in how much of that heat comes forward into the room. This can't come across in words or video, but the efficiency with which it drives heat into the room is literally unmatched, which again increases fuel economy because of how quickly it heats your room.

Who's it for:

 As an all round stove this is the best I have tested, it has the highest score across all the stoves I've used and tested and I'm excited to find if anything can equal it. There is a reason my father saw this in several R & D departments, it really is that good. If the money doesn't scare you off then I can't think of any reason it wouldn't be for you. The only trouble is the manufacturer currently has scope to make around 4000 of these per year world wide, and unfortunately the demand in just Britain is around 6000 per year, so it's certainly good, but can you get one???