I have an electronic fuel gauge on my 208 adventure. My gauges are Yamaha clusters. The last time I fueled my boat the gauge read about 3/4 of a tank after refueling. I refueled recently and the gauge was reading about an 1/8 of a tank. I was going to fill it up all the way when I found that I still had about a half of tank of gas. My tank holds 86 gallons. Is this typical with these gauges to be that inaccurate? Is their something I can do to tweak the gauge or float if that's the issue?
Fuel Gauge
- Thread starter SScooper
- Start date
If you have the display with the bars, when 1 bar shows and is not flashing, you have somewhere between 20 to 30+ gallons of fuel left. When the one bar starts to flash, you have 20 gallons or so.SScooper said:
The thing to keep in mind is that the reading depends to a great degree on the angle of the boat ( and therefore the tank). With the boat on plane, the gauge might read 4 or 5 bars but when you slow down and get off, it might read 2 bars. Depending on the motor hanging off the boat and things like gear and the like, the readings can be skewed a lot.
For my 208, what I can say is that each bar represents about 10 gallons of fuel when more than two bars are displayed. So if I am at rest with whatever load I have and the gauge reads 5 bars and than later at rest reads 4 bars, I used up 10 Gals or so.
Readings on plane or with the bow raised are grossly inaccurate.
Since have a good idea of the miles I will be travelling on a trip, and I know the fuel consumption for my config, I just make sure I have enough fuel in the tank so that I don't get to the one flashing bar. If it gets there, I better be closer than 10-15 miles to home port
Parthery
GreatGrady Captain
What year is your 208? If it's newer and powered by a Yamaha four stroke after 2005 or so, you are better off getting the fuel management piece hooked up and watching the number of gallons you have used.
GW fuel gauges are notoriously inaccurate. I'll agree with Seasick in that one bar left on the gauge is typically 15-20 gallons in these boats. However, once the bar starts to flash, you are down below 6 or 8 gallons....and you WILL run out of fuel. I know from experience.
If you need a new sender, the best ones are made by WEMA (http://www.wemausa.com). Call GW customer service and ask them for the tank depth of the boat...then order a sender from WEMA that is 1/2" shorter. It's a drop in installation and connect two wires and you are all set.
GW fuel gauges are notoriously inaccurate. I'll agree with Seasick in that one bar left on the gauge is typically 15-20 gallons in these boats. However, once the bar starts to flash, you are down below 6 or 8 gallons....and you WILL run out of fuel. I know from experience.
If you need a new sender, the best ones are made by WEMA (http://www.wemausa.com). Call GW customer service and ask them for the tank depth of the boat...then order a sender from WEMA that is 1/2" shorter. It's a drop in installation and connect two wires and you are all set.
I have found that cleaning the fuel sender's ground contact miraculously adds many gallons to the readout on my fuel gauge.
Interesting but hard to understand why that would be. If the sender's ground or the tank ground were bad ( no or poor connection) the gauge reads towards full. By cleaning the contact, the gauge would go to a true reading and that would most likely be lower than it read with a bad groundPez Vela said:
Parthery said:
The problem is that you have to notice when the bar actually starts to blink because once it does, it will continue to blink until you run out of fuel. Running out of fuel doesn't necessarily mean that the tank is completely empty. It means that the pickup is above the fuel level and that level changes as the angle of the hull changes. It may seem counter-intuitive but if you start to sputter, the trick is to move weight ( people) towards the rear and try to raise the bow. Better yet, don't go out without enough fuel to get back with some spare
I can only report my experience and can't argue the electromechanical explanation. I am reading from a sender attached to an EP-65R connected to my NMEA2000 network.
enfish
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I ended up replacing the factory sending unit in my boat because the float would randomly get stuck at various positions so the gauge would read random levels of fuel. Eventually the magnet broke off the float so the gauge was always reading empty. I let it go like that for a few years because I monitored the fuel level using the total gallons burned on the fuel management system. But I discovered I like to have the cross reference of a working fuel gauge too. So $50 plus about 20 minutes of work and the new sending unit works great. If you change the sending unit to make sure you're not full of fuel, otherwise you'll have fuel pouring out the sending unit hole when you remove it.
I have a 2000 272 and don't trust the fuel guage 100% for reasons mentioned above. Instead, I cross reference it with the fuel flow guage which I reset with every fill. As with anything on a boat, redundancy is a good thing.