My experience is with two corn burning setups.  Dad has had an LDJ boiler in his basement for nearly 20 years, and I've been running a US Stove 6041 in my basement for about 10 years.

Dad's boiler has overall been a good unit, and is still going strong.  It has needed a few small parts/mods over the years, and I wouldn't be surprised if it sprang a leak anytime, but it has burned a lot of corn.  If you are looking to produce real heat from corn, I would suggest a boiler or furnace in a back dirty room of your basement, or an outside boiler.  Dad has his corn coming in from outside feed tank with a flex auger system, so the boiler room naturally gets somewhat dusty.

My 6041 heats the semi-finished part of the basement, and heat rises up the steps to supplement heat pump on the main floor.  Dumping corn buckets into the stove and emptying ash is dirty enough that I would never want to do it in my living room.  On my particular stove, the air wash system isn't great, so a good portion of the glass is usually smoked/ashed over.  It's also finicky on keeping the air/fuel ratio correct.  Often it will burn all night and still be good in the morning, other times it will gradually overfill the pot and go out as it suffocates itself.  I've done various fiddling with issues over the years.  One example is that a power failure can easily result in a house full of smoke, as happened recently.  My solution is to run the exhaust fan independently of the stove controls, and power it with a UPS unit, so the fan will continue to run until the fire has had a chance to completely extinguish.

 If we get the urge for ambience in the living room, we just burn a wood fire in the fireplace occasionally.