WhippetGood
Member
Hey all -
I own a 2016 Greenline 48 (purchased used in 2018) and it was suggested that I post about my "re-power' experience. I put that in quotation marks because I went from a Hybrid to non-hybrid system in 2019.
First off, this was our second boat - we had a Searay Sundancer as our first boat in Marina Del Rey, but wanted to do longer and larger cruising - we found the Greenline 48 very attractive (Admiral loved the galley up) and the price was right for a young boat with low hours. The previous owner was a "new boater" from what I understood and wanted to offload it. The hybrid system was very new, and Greenline 48 previously went bankrupt in 2015 (and was purchased by Seaway in 2015) and the boat was kind of an orphan. The support and distribution system in the USA was broken, with no support on the West Coast that we were aware of. The result from my perspective: boat was on the market for nearly a year, and the price was reasonable...I want to preface this that there is now a support system and infrastructure in North America, and the group out of Seattle has been supportive, and other Greenline owners appear to very happy with the company and the hybrid system. Of course, it is 2024 and this was a 2016 boat built in 2015 during bankruptcy proceedings!
So, being in love with the walk around, the layout, the fit and finish, the low hours (under 50!) - and having a great and very thorough inspection (hull soundings etc) we took the boat on a few sea-trials. During one of the trials, there was a terrific shuddering and shaft issue. At the time we were told that KKMI believed it to be a shaft out of alignment, and they replaced the shaft at owners expense once we purchased the boat at a significant further discount.
We determined that the boat itself was sound, and that the cost of removing the hybrid system (if we had to do that) would be less than the discount we received on purchase. As a side note - the hybrid on this boat, in CA seas, would allow us to travel at 5-7 knots for about 20-30 minutes, or the distance to get out of the harbor. If you then engaged the engines you could fully charge the battery bank quite quickly (a few hours) from the HD alternators, and then return to electric only, for about 20-30 minutes. Although cruising silently was very cool, the actual capability wasn't something we were excited about for our uses. I understand that the battery banks + efficiency in current boats is far far superior, and that folks can cruise on Electric from anchorage to anchorage without ever engaging the main engines. I did not have the same experience, so I was unconcerned if we decided to remove the Hybrid system.
Thus the boat was ours in summer of 2018. Of course, on pickup the shaft issue did not repeat during further trials - but as we thought it might - it re-occured on subsequent sailings once back in its new home port of Marina Del Rey. We believed that the issue was the clutch - there was a clutch that would disconnect the diesel Volvos and connect them to the electric Bosch motors. You are supposed to go to neutral, engage the electric motors, and then drive in electric mode. The clutch appeared to be engaging while in gear, without pushing the 'hybrid button' and at random times.
We attempted to diagnose and repair the issue, but at the time we couldn't get West Coast support, and the cost of bringing out a support person (was looking like $240 an hour including travel, accommodations etc - with no guarantee of repair) - and it seemed that the manufacturer had little information on our hull and was moving on to better systems, so in 2019 we decided to remove the Hybrid system on our boat, and leave the dual Volvo D-220's in place.
This entailed removing the clutches, the Bosch motors, the cooling system for the electric engines, removing the Volvo Diesel engines, adjusting the shaft length etc. The project delayed our entire 2019 season because along the way we discovered that the Generation 1 of the Hybrid system leveraged custom Volvo software/firmware (as in , modified, unoriginal) and external components were wired into the Volvo harness (as in, modified, unoriginal). The Volvo technicians discovered that the engines had never been warrantied due to the extensive custom modifications. So one of the advantages of 're-powering' and removing the Hybrid: Volvo offered to start the warranty the engines at year zero (as in 3 year old engines getting the entire warranty) *if* we went back to an original Volvo harness and Software/Firmware. We agreed (I thought this was great) but unfortunately this added on months of time because the Volvo's had issues and we needed Volvo to manually modify the software for our boat due to a custom flywheel timing issue. I don't really understand as I'm more electrical than mechanical - but anyway, they got the software dialed in at the end of the 2019 boating season. Existing Volvos now under a new warranty!
Of course, once we did that work, we decided to leverage the existing space in the boat and we added a Kohler Generator, a Watermaker, AC cooling (boat has Diesel Heat), additional black water storage, some anchor/rode improvements, electrical monitoring via Victron and a Seakeeper Gyroscope (wife gets sick in a beam sea, and this solved it). That work was completed in 2019 and in 2021 we moved the boat to PNW, and it now lives on San Juan Island.
I'm super happy with the boat - she has been great to us, and we are enjoying cruising the PNW and Sailish Sea. Of course we are now waiting for new props due to Galvanic Corrosion issues, but I'll post about that in another Greenline thread.
Cheers!
Chris
I own a 2016 Greenline 48 (purchased used in 2018) and it was suggested that I post about my "re-power' experience. I put that in quotation marks because I went from a Hybrid to non-hybrid system in 2019.
First off, this was our second boat - we had a Searay Sundancer as our first boat in Marina Del Rey, but wanted to do longer and larger cruising - we found the Greenline 48 very attractive (Admiral loved the galley up) and the price was right for a young boat with low hours. The previous owner was a "new boater" from what I understood and wanted to offload it. The hybrid system was very new, and Greenline 48 previously went bankrupt in 2015 (and was purchased by Seaway in 2015) and the boat was kind of an orphan. The support and distribution system in the USA was broken, with no support on the West Coast that we were aware of. The result from my perspective: boat was on the market for nearly a year, and the price was reasonable...I want to preface this that there is now a support system and infrastructure in North America, and the group out of Seattle has been supportive, and other Greenline owners appear to very happy with the company and the hybrid system. Of course, it is 2024 and this was a 2016 boat built in 2015 during bankruptcy proceedings!
So, being in love with the walk around, the layout, the fit and finish, the low hours (under 50!) - and having a great and very thorough inspection (hull soundings etc) we took the boat on a few sea-trials. During one of the trials, there was a terrific shuddering and shaft issue. At the time we were told that KKMI believed it to be a shaft out of alignment, and they replaced the shaft at owners expense once we purchased the boat at a significant further discount.
We determined that the boat itself was sound, and that the cost of removing the hybrid system (if we had to do that) would be less than the discount we received on purchase. As a side note - the hybrid on this boat, in CA seas, would allow us to travel at 5-7 knots for about 20-30 minutes, or the distance to get out of the harbor. If you then engaged the engines you could fully charge the battery bank quite quickly (a few hours) from the HD alternators, and then return to electric only, for about 20-30 minutes. Although cruising silently was very cool, the actual capability wasn't something we were excited about for our uses. I understand that the battery banks + efficiency in current boats is far far superior, and that folks can cruise on Electric from anchorage to anchorage without ever engaging the main engines. I did not have the same experience, so I was unconcerned if we decided to remove the Hybrid system.
Thus the boat was ours in summer of 2018. Of course, on pickup the shaft issue did not repeat during further trials - but as we thought it might - it re-occured on subsequent sailings once back in its new home port of Marina Del Rey. We believed that the issue was the clutch - there was a clutch that would disconnect the diesel Volvos and connect them to the electric Bosch motors. You are supposed to go to neutral, engage the electric motors, and then drive in electric mode. The clutch appeared to be engaging while in gear, without pushing the 'hybrid button' and at random times.
We attempted to diagnose and repair the issue, but at the time we couldn't get West Coast support, and the cost of bringing out a support person (was looking like $240 an hour including travel, accommodations etc - with no guarantee of repair) - and it seemed that the manufacturer had little information on our hull and was moving on to better systems, so in 2019 we decided to remove the Hybrid system on our boat, and leave the dual Volvo D-220's in place.
This entailed removing the clutches, the Bosch motors, the cooling system for the electric engines, removing the Volvo Diesel engines, adjusting the shaft length etc. The project delayed our entire 2019 season because along the way we discovered that the Generation 1 of the Hybrid system leveraged custom Volvo software/firmware (as in , modified, unoriginal) and external components were wired into the Volvo harness (as in, modified, unoriginal). The Volvo technicians discovered that the engines had never been warrantied due to the extensive custom modifications. So one of the advantages of 're-powering' and removing the Hybrid: Volvo offered to start the warranty the engines at year zero (as in 3 year old engines getting the entire warranty) *if* we went back to an original Volvo harness and Software/Firmware. We agreed (I thought this was great) but unfortunately this added on months of time because the Volvo's had issues and we needed Volvo to manually modify the software for our boat due to a custom flywheel timing issue. I don't really understand as I'm more electrical than mechanical - but anyway, they got the software dialed in at the end of the 2019 boating season. Existing Volvos now under a new warranty!
Of course, once we did that work, we decided to leverage the existing space in the boat and we added a Kohler Generator, a Watermaker, AC cooling (boat has Diesel Heat), additional black water storage, some anchor/rode improvements, electrical monitoring via Victron and a Seakeeper Gyroscope (wife gets sick in a beam sea, and this solved it). That work was completed in 2019 and in 2021 we moved the boat to PNW, and it now lives on San Juan Island.
I'm super happy with the boat - she has been great to us, and we are enjoying cruising the PNW and Sailish Sea. Of course we are now waiting for new props due to Galvanic Corrosion issues, but I'll post about that in another Greenline thread.
Cheers!
Chris
