With the price of fuel to tow your boat (or for any other vehicle for that matter), do you ever clean your MAF sensor? This sensor, located in your engine's air intake, normally consists of either one or two tiny, fragile wires, or a plate. It senses the volume of air entering the engine, and the engine's computer uses the signal to control air/fuel mixture. The sensor gets dirty over time, causing the signal to become inaccurate. The result is often a too-rich mixture, reduced power, pinging, or a combination of all three.
Any decent shop can do this, but I'd bet they charge $100 for it. On many cars you can do it yourself with a screwdriver, a T20 security Torx bit, and a can of this:
A can of it is ~$7.00US at a common auto parts store. According to the MSDS', this product contains the same active ingredient (hexane) as CRC's QD Electronics Cleaner, but the MAF sensor cleaner has a higher percentage of it.
Mine is over 10 years old and had never been cleaned. It was obviously way overdue, and I was also due for a new air filter. It makes sense to do one job at the same time as the other. I've noticed in the past couple of months that my truck seemed to have a tad less power than normal and was pinging under load now and then. We'll see if this improves things. Total time for this job was about 30 minutes. Now that I've done it once, it won't take more than 15 next time.
Specific instructions on accessing the sensor on your make & year vehicle can probably be found with nothing more than a Google search. Here's my sensor before cleaning:
And after. You have to look closely, but it's quite a difference:
). That's quite a drop from the average during the first two years of the truck's life, when it was running in the low 17's.