Better to run it on the proper mix of antifreeze and water and if you loose coolant, pull the boat on a trailer and drain it out through the plugs. I don't think it's a good idea to run the cooling system with only water in it, especially distilled water. An open loop cooling system leak from exhaust or intercooler plumbing? Taking water over the bow that is getting into the ski locker or gas tank access hatch? Or a bad carbon seal which I would think could both leak water into the boat, and air into the impeller (causing cavitation), under different conditions?
I can take my 180 out for a full day without a drop draining from the plugs at the end of the day. Why do you have water in the bilge at all may be a worthwhile question though. So I wouldn't take that as a problem, in my opinion. Water in the bilge sits pretty much right under the engine and will get hot. If you get any water in the bilge from whatever source, you should expect it to come out the drain plugs hot.
What do you mean "it almost stalls after a few seconds and then the supercharger kicks in"? If you are experiencing cavitation, then the RPMs would hit up against the limiter (8000 RPM) without the boat accelerating, not low RPMs like I and reading from what you wrote. Can anyone help provide insight into what might be going on? I am excited about the boat and the opportunity to spend more time with my family, but frustrated right now. When throttling up she would do ok until we hit about 6700rpms, then she would spike all the way past 8000 and not give us any more power. We grabbed a few more folks and took her back out. I rode it back at 6500 rpms where it seems to do best and it was fine, but again there was water in the bilge and it was warm.
Yesterday is when I replaced the impeller and the wear ring and then we dropped the boat back in and drove it back to the dock. We haven’t replaced the coolant and still have distilled water as we didn’t want to have another hose blow out and potentially dump coolant. Everything there is still tight and we didn’t lose water from the system as the reservoir is roughly the same as before. But it had me concerned with the coolant system. We pulled the boat out a few days later and when we undid the drain plugs, hot hot water came out. We took it out to test it and the engine was dry. We filled it with distilled water to test out the system and it appears to hold as expected with a clamp around the housing.
My friend and I patched it up and have a replacement housing ordered that we can install at the end of the season as there is a small crack in the plastic where the hose connector goes in.
We swam it back to shore and had a friend pull us back in at very low speed since we didn’t have a clamp onboard for the hose that the manual suggests for when you are towed. We soaked it up out of the hold and disposed of it without contaminating the lake. The engine coolant dumped into the bottom of the boat and the engine overheated and shut off.
The cooling system housing that holds the thermostat literally pushed the thermostat out along with the hose while we were skiing. The vectors help A TON with controlling low speed movement, but also may have introduced a bit of a rooster tail to the wake.Ģ.
They had great customer service and I appreciate their how to install videos. We also added thrust vectors from JetBoat Pilot. I didn’t have the parts for that unexpected problem, but will fix when we pull it out next. We also found water in the jet nozzle and the bearings need to be replaced. The last impeller looked like it was in good condition, but the wear ring was etched quite a bit. So far, we’ve replaced the impeller and wear ring with an oem impeller. I’ve read that if I am trying to have an adult ski behind it, I may need to start it into a turn to keep water in the intake. It is tough to get a slalom skier up behind and will take some practice. Lacking thrust out of the hole - if I punch it, it almost stalls after a few seconds and then the supercharger kicks in. I have the 2005 Challenger 180 215hp Superchargedġ. Thank you to anyone who can provide any help or insight into these. I’ve read through a bunch of the forums here and elsewhere and have tried out several things, but I continue to run into issues.
My family and I are excited, but almost immediately we ran into issues. Hello all, I bought my first boat last week.