Gas gauge - is this right?

[Southtowns27]

'46 pickup with restored gauge cluster. The gas gauge tends to read a little higher than what actually in the tank so I was experimenting with placing some low value resistors in the wire from the sending unit to the gauge to correct the reading. I was using 1 watt resistors and noticed they were getting warm. I threw the multimeter in the line and there was .72 amps flowing through the sending unit wire. That works out to almost 5 watts. That seems high to me, but maybe not?