Engine Hours for Mercury Engine

Electrical and electronic topics for small boats
Paulo
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Joined: Fri Aug 10, 2018 8:59 pm

Engine Hours for Mercury Engine

Postby Paulo » Sun Mar 21, 2021 7:48 am

How can true engine-hours be displayed for 2007 Mercury 60 [FOURSTROKE] engine?

jimh
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Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2015 12:25 pm
Location: Michigan, Lower Peninsula
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Re: Engine Hours for Mercury Engine

Postby jimh » Sun Mar 21, 2021 7:54 am

If your Mercury engine has Smartcraft, you can build a Mercury Smartcraft network, buy a Mercury Smartcraft display, connect the engine and display to the network. You should be able to view engine hours on the Smartcraft display. Contact your authorized Mercury dealer to get details of what you need to purchase and install.

I don't know what you mean by "true" hours. Generally the electronic control unit (ECU) in the engine will accumulate the engine running time.

If you don't want a permanent display, you need to buy Mercury diagnostic equipment, then connect the Mercury diagnostic equipment to the engine, and interrogate the ECU. However, generally Mercury does not sell its engine diagnostic equipment to engine owners.

Mercury uses a proprietary protocol (Smartcraft) for their engine instrumentation.

If you don't want to buy anything, take the engine to a Mercury service dealer. A Mercury service dealer should be able to get the engine hour data from the ECU at a minimal cost.

R DAVIS
Posts: 30
Joined: Thu Oct 22, 2015 10:33 am

Re: Engine Hours for Mercury Engine

Postby R DAVIS » Sun Mar 21, 2021 10:54 am

Have a dealer use diagnostic equipment to tell you your actual current hours.

Then get a Hardline Products HR-8063-2 Hour Meter
https://amazon.com/gp/product/B000WJEY8S/

Hook up the meter temporarily to a spark plug wire on one of your vehicles, and leave it attached until it reflects the hours on your motor. Then install it on your outboard motor and you are good to go. You can mount the unit on your dash or just place it under your cowling with sticky tape. They make another model that doesn't even need to be connected to a plug wire as it works off of vibration, but I imagine it would log hours when trailering the boat due to road vibration.

Paulo
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Joined: Fri Aug 10, 2018 8:59 pm

Re: Engine Hours for Mercury Engine

Postby Paulo » Sun Mar 21, 2021 6:48 pm

Thanks for the idea of the spark-ignition Hardline Products HR-8063-2 Hour Meter monitoring device. The Hardline Products HR-8063-2 Hour Meter sounds like the way to go.

jimh
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Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2015 12:25 pm
Location: Michigan, Lower Peninsula
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Re: Engine Hours for Mercury Engine

Postby jimh » Mon Mar 22, 2021 9:47 am

R DAVIS wrote:Hook up the meter temporarily to a spark plug wire on one of your vehicles, and leave it attached until it reflects the hours on your outboard engine.


My outboard engine has about 700-hours. Using the method suggested above to pre-calibrate the spark-ignition-sensing hour-meter, I will have to drive my car for 700-hours to match the outboard engine hours before I can install the hour-meter on the boat engine.

If my car's average speed were 30-MPH then 700-hours means I will need to drive 21,000-miles. I only drive about 10,000-miles a year, so I will need stop using my boat for about two-years while I used the suggested method to get the cheap hour meter to turn up the necessary 700-hours so I could transfer it to my boat engine.

The typical cost of driving the car 21,000-miles is about $0.50-per-mile, so I will need to invest $10,500 into the car driving to calibrate the hour meter.

The cost of this method seems a bit steep. I think I would just buy the OEM engine instrumentation. In addition to getting the engine hours, the OEM engine instrumentation would provide all sorts of other data from the engine in real time and onward into the future with no added costs and no car driving necessary.

Paulo wrote:The Hardline Products HR-8063-2 Hour Meter sounds like the way to go.

Perhaps, but I recommend you give some thought to the cost of running up the hours using your vehicle to pre-calibrate the hour-meter gizmo once you find out how many hours the boat engine has accumulated. You could also just post a label near the hour-meter that said, "Add nnn hours to get actual hours."

Or, even simpler, estimate the engine hours by assuming 50-hours-per-year. That should get you close to the actual figure.

R DAVIS
Posts: 30
Joined: Thu Oct 22, 2015 10:33 am

Re: Engine Hours for Mercury Engine

Postby R DAVIS » Wed Mar 31, 2021 2:05 pm

jimh wrote: You could also just post a label near the hour-meter that said, "Add nnn hours to get actual hours."
That is the easiest and most obvious solution.