Should it take this long?

I'd say your good. Remember that pork butts will hit a plateau about 150-160* that will seem like the probe temp won't budge or might even go down a few degrees, that's when the magic is happening.

It should take about 2hrs/lb, to get them done and that's not the total weight, but of the individual PBs

It will take the smoker awhile longer to get to temp with a full load of pork butts acting as a cold sync. 3 hrs seems longer than normal, but you're probably OK. An empty smoker (during your seasoning) will come to temp a lot faster.

quote:

Originally posted by Voodoo Child:
I set the oven temp for 225 and it took a solid 3 hours to reach that temp. Is that normal? Thx!

I agree with Pags. You pretty much maxed out the capacity of your smoker with large cuts of cold meat. This would be an excellent notation in your Que journal. Compare it to your next PB smoke. My guess is that 1 vs 2 vs 3 pork butts all in the same weight range will take varying times to achieve your pre-set temp setting.

Let me also add: make sure you don't "block" the temp probe in the back of the smoker, which can be hard not to do with a load of butts. That may or may not be a factor.