3 Tips When Changing Your Boat Fuel

Fuel is one of the most important parts of owning a boat, and many boat owners dread filling up their tanks and even changing out the fuel for the new season. Thankfully, there are tips to keep your budget in place and to keep yourself and the environment safe. You can follow the tree tips found below.

1. Keep It Clean

To start changing the fuel in your boat, you will first have to drain the old fuel that is in it. Make sure that this old fuel goes into an appropriate deposit location rather than just straight into the water that you are over. Oil and fuel in the water can cause damage to wildlife and can even damage the environment as it is difficult to clean out of water. If you can manage it, you can even change the fuel in your boat on land to avoid any spillage into water.

You also need to replace the fuel filter on your boat when you are changing the oil in order to keep it as clean as possible. Using a Mercury outboard fuel filter can help to remove any carbon deposits that are harmful to the environment and that are harmful to your boat. These carbon deposits can even make the need to replace your fuel happen more often and can lead to the life of your boat being significantly shorter. The filter will help to collect any bad fuel and will burn it up rather than allowing for it to collect as well.

2. Know Your Boat

It is important to always know your boat so that you know exactly how much fuel is needed when replacing it. Putting in too much fuel can cause damage to the engine, and the fuel can, again, spill out into the lake. Most boats do not have an automatic shut-off valve in the fuel tank like many cars do, so it is especially important to always monitor the fuel pump. Many boats even have a broken fuel gauge at some point in time, so knowing how much gas you need will help you in the refilling process.

You also can know easily when it is time to change out the fuel in your boat due to deposits or bad fuel just by listening to your boat. It will probably begin to make noises that you have never heard before, and changing the gas is a good first place to start. The engine may also not reach the same power that it once did, meaning that the deposits and bad fuel are starting to affect it. Knowing your boat well can help you with any maintenance concerns that you may run into as a boat owner though.

3. Avoid the Use of Dish Soap

Though there were points above about the importance of mitigating spills when changing the fuel in your boat, it is important to give this tip its own piece. Many individuals will eventually have a spill at some point during boat ownership. If you do have a spill, avoid using dish sap at all costs as this will only make the spill go further to the bottom of the water. This will ruin the floor of the waterway or of the ocean, even damaging the creatures that live there as well.

Only use a rag that is fuel-absorbent if you do happen to have a spill when you are over the water. Start out by removing it from your boat and from the dock so that more fuel does not get into the water while you are changing the fuel. Move the rag to the water where it will help to pull some of the fuel out of the water before it begins to settle in the water. From there, the sun will help to evaporate the fuel back into the atmosphere so that it at least does not damage the water.

Final Thoughts

Changing the fuel in your boat is just one of the many maintenance tasks that have to be done on your vessel for the safety of your boat, yourself, and the environment. Make sure you try to avoid spills and that you never overfill when changing, which helps when you know your boat well.