Boat Motor Gas Mileage How Much Do You use?

[Brent Christian]

Anone know about what a motor gets, really just curious? I have a 150 blackmax on a 18 ft boat, can run all day and use about a full tank.. Had an everrude on a 18 footer and it would use around half a tank?

How much do you all use a day?

[Ski213]

I think there's a whole lot of variables that factor in.  I  have a 225 johnson.  As a basic measure I figure I get 2 minutes of run time at WOT to a gallon of fuel.  It's gonna vary alot with different hulls, HP, and different water conditions.  

[Bluebasser86]

Biggest lake I fish regularly is only 7,000 acres and you can catch fish about anywhere in the lake. Fishing small lakes, combined with the Optimax Pro XS getting pretty good gas mileage and the fact that I just get on plane and cruise about 40 instead of pegging it, I only fill up once ever month or two even with fishing a few times every week during the warmer months. 

[WIGuide]

Bass and Walley Boats Magazine (now defunct) used to do performance tests on a lot of outboards and would list the speed and fuel consumption of the motors. You might be able to find a comparable motor to yours to see what it gets. Yamaha has performance bulletins on their motors doing the same thing. For comparison a 150 hpdi (fuel injected 2 stroke) on an 18 1/2' skeeter topped out a 5 1/2 mpg 22 mph, at WOT it dropped 3.93 mpg at 56 mph. Being that your motor is older though I doubt it's that good of mileage.  

[Further North]

I run a Johnson 140 4 stroke (same motor as the Suzuki DF140 4 stroke) o n a Crestliner CMV 1850.

My last boat had Suzuki DF140

The one before that - an early 90s Lund Pro-V 1800 - had a Johnson GT 150 on it.  That old Johnson would eat a 20 gallon tank in a day of fishing on any lake where I needed to run it much.  Canadian fishing trips needed to include about $550 for gas.  Being able to run all week without filling up in Canada helps that a lot...we put in just over 20 gallons when we got home - about a half tank.

I run at around 30 MPH and between 3500 - 4500 RPM up there.

This last year's trip to Lake of the Woods, and about 165 miles on the water over 7 days, we used $55 worth of gas.  The one year I ran the Suzuki up there I didn't keep track of miles, but I used $165 worth of gas at Canadian prices.