Re: Estimated gas usage on Rude
You can look at fuel consumption on an outboard in a couple of ways. If you are in a hurry to get somewhere, run wide open. If you are not in a hurry you can certainly cruise at a slower speed and you will indeed get better MPG. However, because you are running slower, it takes longer to get where you are going so the amount of fuel burned will be nearly the same. Look at it this way. If you had to run 30 miles and you burned 15 gallons/hour at wide open throttle (say 60 MPH) you would burn 7.5 gallons of fuel for the trip and the trip would take 30 minutes. If you ran at say 30 MPH you would probably burn about 7-8 gallons/hour but the trip would take 1 hour. At that rate you would burn nearly the same amount of fuel for the trip. I run a Navman fuel flow monitor and can attest to that. I also have lots of fuel consumption charts and will soon post a detailed fuel economy comparison looking at Evinrude 75 E-tec, 70 Yamaha 2-stroke, 75 Yamaha 4-stroke, and my own 75 Merc carbed 2-stroke all on the same boat. It will make for interesting reading if you enjoy working with numbers. Four strokes and the DFI two strokes have nearly the same fuel consumption as their older carbed two strokes brothers at wide open throttle. The fuel economy is much better on the 4-strokes and DFI two strokes at low and midrange throttle settings. And I even have some surprises in that regard -- stay tuned.
