TropiQuarium 55 Light Timing Mod

The TropiQuarium 55 from Hagen is a nice little 10 gallon tank, but it has one fundamental problem. The heater, filter and lighting are all connected to the same power lead. This makes it impossible to put the lighting on a plug timer because the heater and the filter would go off with the lights.

What would be much better is if the tank had two power leads, one for the heater and filter and another separate one for the lights. Luckily it's very easy to modify the unit, here's how I modded my TropiQuarium 55 so I could put the lights on a timer. If you can rewire a plug, you can easily perform this modification yourself.

Equipment Required

• Screwdrivers
• Some two core flex (just brown/blue, no earth)
• A mains plug
• A cable gland
• Sharp knife
• Electrical insulating tape
  

Modding
Obviously we make sure the unit is unplugged first. Where the power lead enters the hood, there are two screws when viewed from above. Remove these screws.


Lift off the plastic panel to reveal the electrics.


Attach the mains plug to the flex and strip the other end ready to connect.


Gently pull the existing mains lead up and out of it's slot.


Locate the brown and blue wires connected directly to the existing cable, undo the screws which hold them to the connector block and gently pull the mains cable free of the unit.




Cut off the end of the cable, including the moulded cable gland.


Now take the ends of the old mains lead and the new lead and push them through the cable gland.




Put the newly combined mains leads back into the unit and connect the brown and blue wires from the old mains lead back into the connector block in exactly the same place as they were before. Don't get the wires around the wrong way. Notice how all the brown wires are connected by the same gold coloured copper connector on the right of the connector block, and the same for the blue wires. Make sure you're joining the brown wire to the other brown wires.


Now we have the old mains lead connected back where it was originally.

The unit is back to it's original state, just with an additional (not yet connected) mains lead.

Next we need to connect the new mains lead to the lighting.

For this we need two segments of a new connector block.


Notice how inside the unit the lighting is attached to the existing connector block with two white wires.

One of the white wires is connected to the group of brown wires, the other is connected to the group of blue wires.

Disconnect the white wire which is connected to the group of brown wires and connect it to the brown wire of our new mains lead with our new connector block. Disconnect the remaining white wire and connect it to the blue wire of our new mains lead using the new connector block. We then have something like this:


Apply some insulating tape to the new connector block.


Push everything back inside the unit.


Put the plastic panel back on using the two screws and we're done. We now have the original unit but with an additional mains lead for the lights which we can attach to the mains timer.