The Morso 1410 is a very small, clean-burning wood stove

The Morso 1410 “Squirrel” is a sleek, small wood stove. And I’m very glad to have its company. It’s been getting a fair workout these days, and I’m happy with its performance. Here’s a little rundown on my experience with the small wood stove out of Denmark.

Morso 1410: Small Wood Stove Review

I love the design of the 1410. The attractive squirrel relief on either side of the stove body attracts a lot of attention. Given that this stove occupies a prominent space in the house, it’s a big bonus that the stove itself is pleasing to look at. The proportions are very agreeable, too. Something about the Jotul 602 and other stoves with similar proportions are awkward to me — their relatively deep fireboxes seem too narrow to load comfortably. But the firebox of the 1410 is more like a square, making for easy loading and arrangement of wood.

Note, however, that this stove only accepts very small pieces of wood — up to 12″ maximum, which will require a lot more cutting and processing on the user’s part. However, if you can acquire furniture scraps or some similar free resource for burning, it’s perfect. Either way, expect to do more splitting. But it comes with the territory anyway, right? You can’t expect to want a small wood stove without needing to cut your wood down smaller, too. I actually find that the stove does really well with more pieces of smaller wood, instead of fewer pieces of chunkier wood, as well. It burns extremely cleanly and efficiently, from what I can observe. Many times I’ve walked outside to see little to no smoke coming out of the chimney while the stove is burning. That’s a very good thing.

On that note, the stove has a neat secondary burn feature, whereby air intakes at the top of the firebox help to burn off more of the gases before they escape through the chimney. This helps with the stove’s efficiency, and makes watching the fire burn that much more exciting. It’s hard to explain, but it looks like watching a fiery, upside down waterfall when the burn conditions are just right. That reminds me of my other favorite feature of the stove design — the huge viewing window. I’m a sucker for watching wood burn. (Who isn’t?) The whole process is unobstructed and beautiful to view. Best of all, the air flow pattern inside the stove keeps the glass very clean and free from soot, so the flame is never hidden under a dirty pane of glass.

I also like the damper design, a spin-dial that can be spun down or open. There’s three and a half rotations between fully open and closed, so there’s a lot of play between the most wide open setting and the fully closed position. Something that is a little less intuitive, though, is that you cannot easily tell how open the damper is just by looking at it. It’s a small drawback, I think, because otherwise the wheel offers a big range of tuning the air intake.

There’s one little thing I’m not crazy about – the fact that the cast iron top plate sits up a tiny amount (1/8″, maybe?) if you run your flue out of the rear of the stove. That makes it hard to sit large pots or skillets completely level on the surface of the stove, unless you put them on top of that plate. (12″ skillets hang off the stovetop surface, for example.) But often the hottest part of the top surface is the very front. Since we do a lot of cooking on the stove, it becomes a little annoying sometimes, but if you don’t use your Squirrel for cooking, it shouldn’t matter.

I’m hesitant to claim any particular “burn time” for the 1410. We’ve had some embers left in the morning after a long day of fire burning, and other days when we’ve had to start from scratch. Again, this is a small wood stove, so it needs a lot more tending than a larger stove, and you’ll no doubt experience more time loading it and starting fires.

Overall, the Morso 1410 is a beautiful, well-designed, and clean-burning small wood stove.

p.s. Fun fact — all Morso wood stoves are made from 98% recycled cast iron. Very sweet.