Choosing one
Whether you need a thruster at all, which type and size fit the boat, and what each maker publishes about its own units.
Narrowed down to the few that fit your boat, with the DIY or yard price.
Research, compare and price 230 thrusters, all in one place
The yard's quote is one number with nothing under it, and the forum thread is all opinions and no invoice. So we start from one database: the thrusters commonly sold in the US, from nine makers, and narrow it to the ones that fit your boat. Each one is priced as installed, by a yard or by you, so you can compare them apples to apples. You do not need a yard visit to learn what the job costs.
How to use this site
- Tell the finder about your boat. The thruster finder is our free tool that matches a thruster to your boat. It asks seven to nine questions and lists every electric thruster that fits, from every brand that makes one. Hydraulic thrusters have their own page.
- Read the guide for your hull. Pick your boat type under Your boat below. Each guide sizes the thruster for that boat, prices the job and names the products that fit.
- Check the price. What a bow thruster costs gives dated prices by boat length and thruster type. Already holding a quote? Run it through the quote checker before you sign.
- Decide who installs it. DIY or a yard shows which jobs you can take on yourself and what a yard bills for the rest.
Start with the guide for your boat
A trawler and a bass boat want different answers, so each kind of boat gets its own guide: what size she needs, what the job costs and which products fit.
Then the rest of the question
Brand reviews
Every maker the site covers, read from its own manual and prices on a dated day.
What it costs
Dated prices for the unit and the job, by thruster type, by boat type and by length, and how to take a quote apart.
Installing it
Which jobs an owner can do, what a yard bills for the rest, and the cable and battery the makers specify.
Owning one
What to check when it will not run, what the manuals ask for each year, and what to look at on a boat you are buying.
Why this matters when you dock
- Your rudder quits at docking speed. You come in slowly, going forward, and at that speed the rudder has almost no grip. You can have the wheel hard over and the bow still drifting toward the neighbor's dinghy. The thruster's job is to put the bow where you want it while the engines do the pushing.
- Length alone gets the size wrong. Two boats of the same length can carry very different amounts of boat above the water, and the wind pushes on that. How much of her the wind can catch, how deep she sits and the shape of the hull decide how much thrust the bow needs. Lewmar's own selection chart adds a windage class to the length, and Sleipner says the size depends on the boat's design.
- A list price and a quote are different numbers. A maker's published list price and what an owner remembers of a quote from two winters ago are two kinds of figure. Every price here says which it is.
How we get to these answers
We follow five rules. You can hold us to every one of them on any page here.
- Every price is dated and labeled. We never blend a list price and a recalled quote into one figure.
- Sizing starts with the hull. Wind exposure, draft and hull shape come first. Boat length alone is never the whole answer.
- We size for steering in a docking breeze. What you need is control of where the bow points while you come alongside.
- We flag it when a number is weak. Where the evidence is one forum post from 2019, the table says so.
- We tell you where we make money. Some links here are referral links, and the page carrying one marks it. Every unit is sized by the same calculator in the same 15 knot breeze, and where one falls short of what a boat needs, the page says so. We still have skin in the game, so read us knowing that.
The figures on this site are estimates for planning. They are not an inspection of your boat. Check any size, cable or battery against the maker's manual and with your yard before you buy or install anything. The full wording is in our terms.