Technically a BL34-44 is only legal for sale in Indiana for commercial purposes. Just heating your shop is fine as well as a hog building , chicken coop or business, hook it to your house and leave me out of it. Lets not forget Indiana passed it’s own law as well, so not only do you have the fed regs hanging over your head you can add Indianas as well. What is gonna actually happen to a homeowner who is purposely breaking the law? It’s anybodies guess, as a dealer for me it's a $25,000 fine. All I know is I wouldn’t want to be the homeowner they decide to make an example of.
Far as finicky, I don’t think anybody will argue the E Classics from CB were very finicky, the Edge seems a little better. At least the local dealer is honest with the people he’s talking to as they tell me they were told by him if their wood isn’t at 20% or dryer they aren’t going to be happy with it.
I believe the older Optimizers from P&M aren’t that finicky either, I’m not sure about the new model though. I’d think the new model and Polar’s would run about the same given they share a lot of the same features.
From October till January I went out in the woods and dropped ash trees till it started to get cluttered and I was running out of room without dropping on top of each other, the wife and I would then top em out using the Polaris Ranger, bring it up to the house and fill one of the half cord racks, went straight in the stove from there. Tops were measuring anywhere from 30-35% moisture, this was in a G400 which was oversized at the time, switched out to a G200 in February, by then had all the tops we were gonna burn gone by then and started burning split wood I ran thru the processor, that ran anywhere from 30-40% moisture, no issues other than cleaning the damper plate every 7-10 days. Ash isn’t the easiest to run, doesn’t make a very good coal bed, add a few pieces of hard maple, cherry or ironwood and worked even better.