I have 1800# of them to play with this year, local factory about 20 miles down the road, I doubt they "export" to the lower 48. These guys:
http://www.superiorpelletfuels.com/
The very worst time of year to buy cordwood is March. If you run out of wood here in Feb you have not planned well and are going to have to open your wallet. I just bought a truck load of logs in October for $975 that was sold to me as "5 cords" but is likely to split out to more like 7 cords. Call it 6 cords for 975, I paid $162/ cord for green logs.
To be sure I had to buck them and still have to split and season them, but on the SPF homepage linked above the only folks who really pay $330/ cord to make bio- logs look like a good deal are poor planners. I haven't had to pay $4/ gallon for #2 oil yet neither, my last fill was $3.74/ gallon. And my stove is way better than 50 percent efficient.
I have burnt about ten of the bio logs so far. As above they don't light as easily as cord wood, but light right off on a good bed of coals. With the main stove door cracked open they do indeed burn nuclear hot. With the door shut and the cat engaged (BK Ashford 30 here) they settle right down and burn a good long time for me, very fine ash when they are done.
These ones I can get are the kind that expand lengthwise when burning. The directions say to lay them in the firebox parallel to the glass and when I didn't that one time the end of the log got to pushing up against the glass hard enough for me to open the door and take part of the flaming log out. Throwing half a bio-log out in the snow in the yard seemed like it would be a lot cheaper than replacing the glass in the stove door.
I can't see a difference in my exhaust plume opacity running a bunch of bio-logs versus running a box full of my seasoned birch or spruce. I am in an EPA "non-attainment" area for air quality. It looks like when the air pollution police get here it's going to be curbside measurement of exhaust plume opacity that determines if the homeowner gets a ticket or not. As proposed we have six minutes to get from cold stove to plume opacity under 60%. On low air quality days if will likely be six minutes to get exhaust plume opacity to under 40%.
What I see when my cat equipped BK Ashford is running good is zero percent opacity. Right at the chimney outlet I see nothing, zilch, nada, about a foot away a white puffy cloud forms, should be nothing but water vapor condensing as it cools. I have been practicing even though the rules haven't been finalized yet, never mind have an effective date; but what I have been doing meets the proposed air quality rules.
I fill my Ashford every 12 hours, the cat has been hot enough to be active, continuously, for over a month now. If it is cold out, I run the stove on 2/3 for twelve hours and have a couple inches of coals in the bottom. If it is "warm" out I run the thermostat at 1/3 and have a stove box about half full of burning wood after twelve hours. Either way I disengage the cat, fill the box to full with more cordwood or bio-logs, close the door, re-engage the cat and the exhaust plume is back to zero opacity by the time I can get my boots back on and get out in the yard to look.
To be sure my eyeball is not an EPA calibrated test device. And my cord wood measures pretty much 11-16%MC per gizmo, I have found a few pieces of 18-20% MC here and there. Having said that, I don't see that running bio-logs in a cat stove is any cleaner than running good dry wood in a cat stove.
Pricey little SOBs, but they don't take up very much room for their inherent heat value, and they are dry enough to burn good at time of purchase.