Pontoon Boat & Deck Boat Forum

One of my projects this winter is to install a permanent fuel tank and pitch the portable ones. I'm installing it in a custom cabinet I'm building to hold my batteries and fishing gear. My question is, where does everyone else have their fuel vents at?

My Party Cruiser has it's vent/fill as a single unit.

+1. All the pontoons I've seen have the vent built into the filler neck.

New CG regulations require the vent to be integrated into the fuel fill/cap.

This keeps fuel from being spilled when fueling. With the old way of having the vent just sticking out the side of the boat, most people would fill until the gas spit out the vent. This introduced pollution into the water and air. While the amount from one boat is negligible, multiply this by millions of boats and it was a considerable problem.

There are different designs for deck or bulkhead mount.

You can still buy the old style vent at the big retailer over in Fayetteville, NC. When mounted, it just needs to be at least even, or a little higher, than the filler neck. I was thinking it's about a $16 piece.

The new style vent sometimes spits back gasoline a little, limiting the speed with which you can feed fuel into it.

I plugged off the vent in the filler neck and bought a seperate vent from Overtons, because my old Manitou took fuel very slowly and always shut the pump off. It helped the Manitou alot when filling the tank. it would fuel at full pull. The Premiers is mounted in the filler neck, but its tilted up to the top and it really takes gas fast. No burps or pukes.
Simple to install the one from Overtons, took maybe 15 minutes.
They really don't help to keep fuel from splashing into the water, because the if cap is off and if it overfills, it goes overboard anyway. The EPA regulated it to keep the vapors from entering the atmosphere. Most of the caps have a small check valve in them to release excessive pressure, so guess what? Your still venting to the atmosphere. Just not all the time.

I went ahead and ordered the vented filler even though the vent tube is on the other side of the tank from the filler tube. Just couldn't come up with a place for the vent where I didn't mind gas spilling. I remember my last boat making a mess everytime I filled the tank.

Years ago I bought a whistler to install in my vent line. As I always overfilled the gas and it would spill over the side of my boat. As you filled the pressure would vent out and the thing would whistle when gas got in it it would not. I never had a problem overfilling again. I don't know if they still make them but they were great idea. You never had to worry about gas running down the side of your boat. They even worked poring gas from a can.

jimrs wrote:Years ago I bought a whistler to install in my vent line. As I always overfilled the gas and it would spill over the side of my boat. As you filled the pressure would vent out and the thing would whistle when gas got in it it would not. I never had a problem overfilling again. I don't know if they still make them but they were great idea. You never had to worry about gas running down the side of your boat. They even worked poring gas from a can.

Yes they did work good! I had them in 2 previous boats. Always thought about another one but just haven't done it.