It's easy
2008 -- 86.18 gallons, lotsa boating, lotsa happy cruising time.
2009 -- 13.224 gallons, my one time-a-year fill-up? Nope, a broken leg will do that to your fuel consumption!
We've almost never used a fuel gauge (it stopped working in December 1998, six months after we bought the boat), and always record the fuel use and keep our spreadsheet up-to-date. See: http://c34.org/bbs/index.php/topic,3841.0.html
The spreadsheet calculates fuel use in gallons per hour, hours per gallon, and it provides estimates of the quantity of fuel for the next fill-up based on two different fuel consumption rates of 0.45 g/h or 0.5 g/h. That way I minimize the possibility of fuel spills when we're buying more fuel.
I do this because the fuel tank senders continually go bad, so I figured why bother to keep changing them, just keep good records. I have a friend (and we have some respondents on this board) who use the old tried and true method: put a stick in it! The fuel tank that is! Not everyone has such a straight run of hose from their deck fill to their tank.
And gauges are remarkably misleading if the shape of the tank is not rectangular in the depth or width dimensions. Think about it, as much as some don't like to remember high school math or trig!
Altogether too many people have been misled when their gauges say 1/4 and then only a relatively short time later they've got nothing left but fumes and a dead engine. So many tanks get narrower at the bottom, but the "linear" senders don't know that, do they?
In order to do this you MUST have a functioning engine hour meter.
Ours is an M25 Universal engine. Every twenty engine hours we put in 10 gallons. 23 gallon tank. Not so hard.
2008 -- 86.18 gallons, lotsa boating, lotsa happy cruising time.
2009 -- 13.224 gallons, my one time-a-year fill-up? Nope, a broken leg will do that to your fuel consumption!
We've almost never used a fuel gauge (it stopped working in December 1998, six months after we bought the boat), and always record the fuel use and keep our spreadsheet up-to-date. See: http://c34.org/bbs/index.php/topic,3841.0.html
The spreadsheet calculates fuel use in gallons per hour, hours per gallon, and it provides estimates of the quantity of fuel for the next fill-up based on two different fuel consumption rates of 0.45 g/h or 0.5 g/h. That way I minimize the possibility of fuel spills when we're buying more fuel.
I do this because the fuel tank senders continually go bad, so I figured why bother to keep changing them, just keep good records. I have a friend (and we have some respondents on this board) who use the old tried and true method: put a stick in it! The fuel tank that is! Not everyone has such a straight run of hose from their deck fill to their tank.
And gauges are remarkably misleading if the shape of the tank is not rectangular in the depth or width dimensions. Think about it, as much as some don't like to remember high school math or trig!
Altogether too many people have been misled when their gauges say 1/4 and then only a relatively short time later they've got nothing left but fumes and a dead engine. So many tanks get narrower at the bottom, but the "linear" senders don't know that, do they?
In order to do this you MUST have a functioning engine hour meter.
Ours is an M25 Universal engine. Every twenty engine hours we put in 10 gallons. 23 gallon tank. Not so hard.