The Aspect 14 is a monstrous stove and they make it both as just a room heater, and a central heating stove that can run 5-15 radiators, hot water and still heat a small room too. They are made from steel and have a few options like a multi-fuel grate, a log store and you can get a black handle too.
The Boiler version is very slightly larger than the standard stove, and has 4 tap ins on the back to connect to 2 flows and 2 returns from and to the boiler. The output is fairly variable depending on radiator, cylinder and room sizes, but this utility could have been lost from the industry so I'm very glad to see that this is not the case.
Â
Lighting: 5/10
I rated this at 5/10 primarily because a big thing like this is quite different to a smaller stove. Things like this will require lots more fuel and because there is so much size and weight, more time too to heat up. If compared to its contemporaries, it worked very well, but because of the difference to most stoves we test, I wanted to draw attention to some real differences.
Â
Cleanness: 10/10
Just the fact this stove has passed the requirements for DEFRA and Eco-Design is reason enough to give this stove 10/10, but then you start using it and it goes even further. It runs at 77% efficiency which exceeds many 5KW stoves we've tested, making a relative truck of a stove run at the same levels of efficiency as a 4 cylinder car. It ran over night whilst remaining clean and during normal running I never struggled to keep the flames looking pretty and the glass cloud and mist free.
Â
Controls:Â 9/10
 The handle gets hot on this stove and so does the hearth. This stove is very big and powerful, so that heat is going everywhere whether you like it or not. It does come with some gloves, which keeps it easy to use, and with regard to spillage you only struggle with that if you're messing around with it whilst its still got lots of fuel in it, so this can be avoided. The stove also comes with a small ash shovel, which you would use to empty half the ash once a fortnight assuming you were using it a lot. You then get to the air control itself and if you haven't seen the video, click on it at the bottom of this page, because it is amazing! (exactly 5 minutes into the video)
Â
Economy:Â 9/10
This stove ran for 8 hours on a single net of kiln dried logs, which is amazing, but obviously this type of appliance is not well suited to little kiln dried logs from a net. This is bought by a serious user who is either buying large amounts of wet fuel that they will then split and dry themselves, or they are logging their own trees and doing the same thing. This stove has excellent economy, but you do need to bear in mind its huge potential power and therefore its hunger for larger logs and more fuel generally than smaller appliances.
Â
What I thought:
This stove is designed as a woodburning stove but could have an add in grate added if you wanted to burn some other fuels, and I like the customisable nature of it with its black handle and log store. The heat into the hearth is obvious when you think about, but was never the less surprising. I also found that my little logs from nets worked well, but were a little puny in this monstrous stove. Having said that if you're a serious user, you're going to take fuel seriously and you want to get a stove that is going to take heating seriously then this is a superb option. It's very clean, efficient, superbly controllable and has unbeatable utility. It's very different to many of the models that we look at, and other than the reality that big stoves need more fuel, every single one of those differences had genuinely big advantages for any of this stoves potential users.
Â
1 comment
This is really interesting, I’ve not encountered this at all. When I saw this I did have a word with members of my family and other friends in retail, none of them have had an issue (some of which have sold a reasonable number of them). Good to know though. I assume that their service was reasonable given this obvious inconvenience?