2016 F150 2.7l ecoboost , ideas to get the best towing mpg

[nummbr7]

Looking for suggestions on upgrades to help my towing mpg , also any tuning notes/ideas would be appreciated. (Right now Running a 93 oct SCT file attached) My 2015 had the same engine and got about 10-11mpg towing my camper hoping to improve on that a bit.
Going on a 3000mi trip in January , then possibly a 6000mi trip in the summer , both towing my camper (about 5000lbs)
all stock right now, I don't really want louder exhaust (wife and dogs don't care for it) but sure I can get away with downpipes, and a mid pipe if that would help, also was going to get a CAI not sure which one yet.

Brady

[LastPlace]

stay out of boost.

[nummbr7]

While towing, while maintaining highway speed, I?m all ears

[LastPlace]

Being in boost while towing kills your fuel economy.

if your goal is fuel efficiency stay out of boost, don’t up the boost.

[FieSTafury]

Take the turbos off........lol. Anytime you're in boost, mpg goes out the window.

[Puggyberra]

Looking for suggestions on upgrades to help my towing mpg , also any tuning notes/ideas would be appreciated. (Right now Running a 93 oct SCT file attached) My 2015 had the same engine and got about 10-11mpg towing my camper hoping to improve on that a bit.
Going on a 3000mi trip in January , then possibly a 6000mi trip in the summer , both towing my camper (about 5000lbs)
all stock right now, I don't really want louder exhaust (wife and dogs don't care for it) but sure I can get away with downpipes, and a mid pipe if that would help, also was going to get a CAI not sure which one yet.

Brady

Hey nummbr7, I'll give you a little more technical answer to your question, but the short version is the large drop in mpg is a combination of needing more fuel to get more power (this you're used to with any vehicle you've towed with before) and engine/turbo/CAT safety through running constant enrichment. As to the first part of that as you increase boost/air load the engine can't run quite as efficiently which you can see somewhat easily by spark advance and MBT spark dropping rather significantly. That alone would drop your mileage some, but not the ~50% commonly seen. The other large contributor to the drastic decrease in mileage is when the ecu commands (CL) Cat. Temp. Enrich., towing at highway speeds can cause the engine to run in that mode the majority of the time. While in the cat enrichment mode commanded air/fuel will richen to between .85-.60 lambda (so quite rich). This is done intentionally to allow you the power you're expecting from the engine, while still keeping the turbos exhaust turbine cool and the cats cooler despite spark advance running much lower than it typically would. If you try to override the cat protect enrichment and still tow utilizing 5-10 psi of boost to maintain highway speeds you risk doing rather significant damage to your turbos and/or cats.

The best way to try and improve fuel efficiency while towing while, and still keeping your cat's and turbo's temps low enough to be safe is to try and keep boost much lower, closer to 0-3 psi ideally. Depending on the weight and frontal cross section of your camper that may not be possible, but reducing speed and staying in lower gears can help. Even trying all that you're not going to go from 10 mpg towing -> 20 mpg... depending on how hard the truck has to work to pull your camper you're probably looking at a best case of somewhere between 14-18 mpg.

Your SCT tune probably already raised the max allowed turbo and cat temps, and restricted the cat temp enrichment to leaner than the .6 stock. I'd recommend caution trying to move those limits too far from their stock values and still towing.

[metroplex]

Like Puggyberra was saying, you need to stay out of boost but that isn't always possible especially when towing. That is why a lot of F-series owners have found better towing MPGs with the 5.0 or 6.2 N/A V8 engines.