4 butt cook yesterday - learning eggsperience

I've done a few butts in the past, but decided to try four on my large this weekend for a total of 36 pounds going on. Kicked this effort off Friday night around 8pm after my boys were in bed, first the meat from restaurant depot:





then the seasoning (used the BGE rub recipe from the book that comes with the egg - wanted something simple this time)



The Stoker in it's weatherproof container, notice the slot I cut for the wires to come out


Lump all ready to go


I know, I know.... yep, I fired up the gasser to cook some deer sausage and hamburgers for the wife and I.... we had to eat something and the egg was all ready for the low n slow Just more "fuel" for me to get the small I want.



Here they are, all loaded up





All ready for the night, got a hat on the top, stoker all waterproofed (we did get a little bit of rain). Go Tigers!


First one ready to come off (back right one)


All of them in the ice chest for a while


The bones and some of the remains (already refrigerated some of it). Whats left on the cookie sheet is for dinner


Nice pretty stoker log graph before I started taking them off AND before the wind kicked up. Take a look at the next picture, u can see the fan didn't run after 7am and the temp steadily rose. We had VERY crazy wind yesterday.


Twenty Two and a half hours later, I finally took off the last butt. Wow, what a marathon... This graph gets ugly, b/c I only have one meat probe, so I kept moving it to the next smallest butt until they were all done.


At the twenty hour mark, I was a tad worried about potentially running out of fuel, but let it go. I meant to take a pic this morning, but forgot...Anyway, theres enough lump in there to last another 5-6 hours...Egg does well

Next time: I think I'll start earlier the night before (didn't finish pulling until 7pm last night), I'll also try standing the butts on their sides (as I've seen recommended here) or put the smallest one on top. Of course, the smallest one was on the bottom and got done first, so it was a PITA to get it out or maybe just do 3 at a time. I also need to find a better way/place to clip my pit probe, the butt on top kept touching the probe and this proved problematic, so I wound up clipping it on the grate.

Any suggestions for dealing with all the wires coming out of the egg? Every time I had to open the lid, I had 3 wires coming out (was using my maverick for a 2nd probe) and it was quite challenging to get them all to lay flat so the lid would close.

I do have to say that the stoker was nice to have... I woke up at 5am to check on the plumbing, grabbed my blackberry and scanned the emails throughout the night and confirmed that the temp was doing just fine. Thanks to Amir for his software.

Anyway, great eggsperience!