# Modding a Hagen Light-Glo hood



## pitabread (Jul 14, 2006)

I recently decided to completely reaquascape and replant my 48 gallon freshwater tank. Unfortunately, lighting was going to be an issue. I have a stock "Light-Glo" hood that came as part of my aquarium kit. It includes two 30 watt fluorescent bulbs. I had also previously modded the hood to include a 55/65 watt compact fluorescent tube (using Coralife's E-Z Ballast kit). Because of the limited space in the hood, however, I ended up installing the 55 watt bulb into one of the rear corners of the hood.










As you can see in the pic, the placement of the 55 watt bulb and the lack of reflectors limited its usefulness to that one corner of the tank. I knew I wanted more lighting across my tank, so I needed to relocate the 55 watt bulb ideally into the center of the hood. However, this was made problimatic by this center block of plastic, which housed the 2x30 watt fluorescent ballast (circled in red).










Therefore, the only solution was to gut the hood and relocate the fluorescent ballast. I also needed to install a proper reflector.

First, I opened up the top of the hood, to expose the ballast and wiring.










Based on the size of the ballast, the only practical location for it was on the back of the hood. To do this, I first re-ran a bunch of the wires through plastic tubes around to the back of the hood.



















Then I screwed the ballast on the back and connected up all the wiring again.










Next, I gutted the center plastic housing using my trusty Dremel.










I wanted to seal off the remaining compartments with the wiring, so that moisture from the tank wouldn't get into the wiring. To do this, I cut a couple pieces of acrylic, then fixed them to the remaining compartments with aquarium silicon.



















Next up was the reflector. After trying and failing to find anything suitable locally, I ordered a 48" Coralife Aqua Mirror reflector. This reflector was advertised as expanding to an 8 1/2" width, which was ideal for what I needed. In fact, by taking apart the two sides of the reflector, it actually could cover 9 1/2". I also was going to need to cut it down to only 35", which is why I ordered the 48". I figured the extra pieces may be handy for smaller projects in the future. Here's a shot of the reflector pieces:










Here they are installed in the hood:










And here is the finished product with the bulbs installed (minus the hookup for the 55/65 watt ballast):


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