J/30 Class Association Forums J/30 Forum The Boat, Sails and Equipment engine hours

My engine meter shows 1220 hours. It is working but it doesn't seem like enough hours for a 30 year old boat. Could it have flipped?

Rhapsody doesn't have an engine hour meter. How many digits are on the meter? Any chance that the meter was replaced by the previous owner?

The meter has five places the last one being 10ths.

if I look back at the hours on the first 24 years on #505 ... in which we sailed on and off a mooring 95% of the season and we mostly depended on running motor when batteries needed to be recharged for radio and later gps --- using maybe 1 tank of diesel a summer [24]

I wouldn't be surprised at low hours. We hear a lot of talk about 1-2 tanks of fuel a summer.

The boats were not factory equipped with motor hour meters so you have to guess when it was installed. but if it looks like the rest of the panel ... it may be near original ... some skippers are addicted to the oil change every x hours or so.

Of course the last 6 years I go through maybe 3 tanks of diesel a year in Naples getting to the Gulf. [18]

So I'm thinking I did 24+18 = 42 10-gal refills in 30 years.

or 420 gals X 2.5 hours a gal gives us 1050 hours.

but hey if you are doing 30 gal a year. that's 900 gal over 30 years and 2250 hours. which still isn't bad for an engine that a lot of people say is worth 10,000 hours if treated ok.

Thanks That puts it into perspective.

Since I replaced my hour meter I am putting on about 150 hours per year on the engine, but I use my vessel a LOT (Including 4 hour deliveries to races, the engine is probably only running 25% of the time).

Oh and I can't tell you how many tanks I go through per year as I like to keep the fuel level quite low to save weight and only put in the estimated fuel for the mission with some reserve.

Belle Faster (#537) averaged about 20 gallons a year. Only if I ventured out of Raritan Bay did I need a top up during the season. At 0.5 gallons per hour, that's 40 hours per year - tops!