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2011 115 4 stroke inter sputter help

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speedyssss

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Hoping someone out there might be able to help me. I have a 2011 merc 115 4 stroke. Lately i have a intermittent no power/sputter. Usually it happens mid day. I would go to start the motor after being on the water for a hour or so. It starts fine but when I start to give it gas nothing happens. I could full throttle it and it would not rev. Sometimes you can putter around but you cant get the engine to rev off idle. If I get lucky shut the motor off and retry a couple times and the engine works fine and off I go. Sometimes it happens once a day and sometimes it runs fine all day. Fuel filter and plug basics all done. Thinking possible injector, fuel pump high or low, maybe bad fuel or fuel line. But dont understand why it only seems to happen after I just started the engine. You would think if it was any of the items I mentioned. Then the motor would lose power at various times. Not just after I started the engine. I have car mechanic back ground, but kinda new at outboards. Any help would be appreciated.
 
I have same 115 hp outboard as described, my issue very similar to yours as far as symptoms, we found the main engine wire harness had a bad connection in the connector. That bad connection was dropping the five volts to sensors and then motor went into self protect mode. Our fix was, separating the connector pins and pressing them in with tester to confirm pins are set in correctly, our problem ended. We found the issue by wiggling harness and watching issue come and go... Good Luck.

speedyssss said:
Hoping someone out there might be able to help me. I have a 2011 merc 115 4 stroke. Lately i have a intermittent no power/sputter. Usually it happens mid day. I would go to start the motor after being on the water for a hour or so. It starts fine but when I start to give it gas nothing happens. I could full throttle it and it would not rev. Sometimes you can putter around but you cant get the engine to rev off idle. If I get lucky shut the motor off and retry a couple times and the engine works fine and off I go. Sometimes it happens once a day and sometimes it runs fine all day. Fuel filter and plug basics all done. Thinking possible injector, fuel pump high or low, maybe bad fuel or fuel line. But dont understand why it only seems to happen after I just started the engine. You would think if it was any of the items I mentioned. Then the motor would lose power at various times. Not just after I started the engine. I have car mechanic back ground, but kinda new at outboards. Any help would be appreciated.
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Check the grounds, I had a similar issue which I finally traced to a ground cable between the starter and block. The bolt which secured it was a few thousandths of an inch too long causing it to bottom out and feel tight, yet the cable was just loose enough to rotate if I grabbed the terminal and rotated it .

oddly enough while trying to diagnose the increasingly frequent and almost predictable power loss, I happened to hit the trim switch and realized doing so corrected the issue for a bit and it would revert to running poorly soon after.
this let me to believe it was a wiring / power issue,

Each time it faltered I noticed the idle air control / intake hiss would have a different sound than when it ran perfectly, and when I finally pulled on the ground strap while checking harness etc voila it changed pitch each time I moved the cable . Here’s a video, I’m only moving ground strap , hiss change is from idle air control reacting to the compromised connection.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/723v8bqzgwtnqu4/F43D475B-3678-4D5B-9523-1625C48A7FD0.MOV
 
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