Starting last year, I've had an issue with my 1999 175 EFI (serial number 0G944199) quitting shortly after starting it up. It never happens first thing when I'm out on the water. When it does happen, I'll get it started and then it will run for a few seconds or more, and then I'll get an alarm beep and it'll quit. I can usually get it started again right away, but it'll die again within seconds. Usually after several times of getting it started and it dying, it will eventually start up and work. When it's running, it runs fine. A friend of mine is much more mechanical than me and he said he doesn't think there's any problem with the motor itself, as it runs like a champ. He seems to think it's an electrical problem and we thought we had verified this a few weeks ago. The motor ran fine at the start of a day of fishing. We didn't use it much (we were on a no-wake lake), but we had my Humminbird Helix 10 Mega SI unit on consistently for probably 6-8 hours. That unit is hooked up to the starting battery. Later in the day when we tried using the gas motor again, it started having problems. We went through the start-up, die, start-up, die sequence a few times. Then I turned off the Humminbird and when I started the motor I revved it up in neutral and left it revved up for several minutes. My buddy said to do this so it would charge the battery a little bit. Once I did this, I didn't have any more problems that day (but I did leave the Humminbird off). The next day we only turned the Humminbird on when we would have the gas motor running, and we didn't have any problems that day. So, we assumed we had figured out what was going on.
Fast forward until this past weekend. I had only been out one other time and didn't have any problems. I was fishing with my dad and we used the gas motor at the start of the day without any problems. Because I'm familiar with the lake and it's very shallow, I didn't even bother turning on the depth finder. Later in the day, the motor started having problems again, so now I'm stumped. The only things I have figured out are:
1. Once the engine dies the first time and I re-start it, it will always die again and at that point I have to re-prime the bulb. It's as if the first time it dies, it tells the engine to quit feeding fuel to the engine.
2. Coincidence or not, it seems like if I have the engine tilted up for a while (trimming it up to avoid hitting bottom in shallow water), I'll have issues when I go to use it. I've also found that if I'm having problems, trimming
the motor down all the way seems to help with getting it going again (if I was trying to use it while still trimmed up).
3. When I first started having the problem, I took the starting battery out and had it load-tested. It tested out OK. I have also made sure that all connections to the battery are tight. Even though I have quite a few things hooked up to the battery (livewell & bilge pumps, older Lowrance depthfinder at the bow, Humminbird at the console, and navigation lights), I very rarely use anything other than the depthfinders.
4. When the motor is running, it runs great. It doesn't act like anything is wrong with the motor itself.
5. I don't normally have the voltage number up on my Humminbird, but when I did last year (trying to figure out the problem), it didn't appear to be low voltage. However, I thought I had read before that these motors are very voltage sensitive, so I'm wondering if that could still be an issue.
I had an appointment late last year to get the motor in to have it looked at, but wound up cancelling it because I took the boat out a couple of times after making the appointment and it ran just fine. I didn't want to spend the money to take it in and have them not be able to locate the problem since it wasn't happening.
Any clues or ideas about this? I only have 3 batteries in my boat and two of those are solely for my 24-volt trolling motor, so I can't really switch my depthfinders onto a different battery. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
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gone fishn yall
