gas or electric?

The range is determined by 2 things, the number of amp hours and speed. Go fast and the range drops, a gain of 1 mph will cut your range in half at the top end. I have an electric outboard due to regulation. At 3/4 throttle I get about 3 hours run time at full throttle 1.3 hours. The change in speed is less than 1 mph. As the throttle increases amp usage jumps up but speed increase dies.

I have a 14 foot jon that I only fish waters that allow electric and when I first started out I had a 30 thrust that came with the boat when I bought it. I bought another on the recommendation of a friend saying that if the older one failed I would be good. Sure enough the older one failed on the water and I had a back up. So I ended up buying a second. I started using the boat to fish small rivers with one being tidal and I dont have any problems getting to where I am going. I do run 2 lead batteries but will be swapping those out for lithium when these go bad. I recently aquired a 55 thrust and used that for the first time last week with the 30 and what a difference. So in short just starting out I would go with a 55 thrust with a lithium battery and go from there. If you find that does not get you to where you want to go fast enough and can afford it look into gas but you will have noise. If you really got the bucks you may want to look into an electric outboard but Im poor and know they are expensive. Hope this helps

CRS said:

The range is determined by 2 things, the number of amp hours and speed. Go fast and the range drops, a gain of 1 mph will cut your range in half at the top end. I have an electric outboard due to regulation. At 3/4 throttle I get about 3 hours run time at full throttle 1.3 hours. The change in speed is less than 1 mph. As the throttle increases amp usage jumps up but speed increase dies.

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What voltage does your electric outboard run on? The only ones I've ever been around was decades ago on a big electric only reservoir my friends dad had a lowe 16ft deep v with a ray electric outboard on it pretty sure it was 48 volt but that was 30 years ago.

flatheadsteve said:

What voltage does your electric outboard run on? The only ones I've ever been around was decades ago on a big electric only reservoir my friends dad had a lowe 16ft deep v with a ray electric outboard on it pretty sure it was 48 volt but that was 30 years ago.

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I have a 9.9 Elco, it is a 48 volt system. I use LiPo batteries 2 of them 95 amp hour each . I have a shunt that shows the remaining hours at the current usage. I would suggest always adding the shunt because the amount of usage changes dramatically with the amount of power you select. My motor is about 4 years old.

thanks for all the inputs. gives me plenty to think about.