225XS upgrades

Does anyone know if a 225XS can be upgraded to 250HP? Preferrably to factory specs to retain reliability. Your input would be appreciated.

Thanks,

If you post up the serial we can do a comparison of the parts differences etc to see if it's even possible.

The bigger questions is "why would you want to do it"?

25 horses may sound significant, but marine engines, unlike cars, need significant horsepower increases before you notice even minimal performance increases.

This is a fairly accurate "rule of thumb" when it comes to marine engines whether inboard, outboard or I/O -

To see a 15% performance increase you need to increase horsepower by 50%....

Going from 225 to 250 horses would result in about a 3% top end increase under absolutely ideal conditions.

So if say your top speed with the 225 is 50 mph, moving up to 250 horses would give you a potential top speed of 51.5 mph.

That increase might be "significant" if you are on the racing circuit, but for the average boater 1) you wouldn't notice the difference unless you are staring at the speedometer and 2) it could cost you upwards of a thousand bucks to get that extra mile per hour.

And if you happen to live in the US it is "illegal" to alter the horsepower of an outboard after it leaves the factory unless you meet the racing exemptions. And while it's probably done to thousands of motors and they are never caught I would tend to bet that even if you had an accident unrelated to the motor alterations and an investigation revealed the "tampering", they would hang you out to dry.

At the end of the day, the only way to effectively increase the performance of a given boat is to unbolt the current motor and strap on another one of "significantly" more horsepower - in your case, a 350 would give you an increase that you would actually notice...