E30 Headlight Question

[MustBeNice]

Hi everyone,
I know there are plenty of headlight threads here, but I have a specific question I haven’t found an answer for. I am converting my headlights from sealed beams to ellipsoids and I was making an adapter harness H4 to 9005/9006. For the low beam I am only pining two of the plugs and ignoring the second power, but the high beam only has two pins, one ground and two powers to the one pin. My question is, is it okay to wire both the powers to a single power to the new headlight or will it cause problems? I assume I will end up having to cut the wire but I wanted to avoid that.

probably a dumb question but just trying to learn here and I appreciate any insight.

[82eye]

there is a sticky topic on various headlight upgrades and wiring here :

E30 Lighting Guide + DIY Bi-Xenon Conversion - R3VLimited Forums

[Northern]

Sealed beams have dual filament low beams (I'm going to just call this the 'outer light'), so there's a low beam circuit and high beam circuit in the same bulb for this outer light. That's what the second wire is for.
When you turn on the high beams, all 4 lights will light up.

Don't bridge the two hi/low wires. Figure out which one is the low beam and connect that to the ellipsoid outer light.

The high beam/inner light wiring should be fairly obvious as it's just 2 wires.

It's been a long time, but I think you can trace the sealed beam outer light's high beam wire back to the high beam connector on the inner light and remove the extra wire.


To get all 4 lights to illuminate, you need to solder a jumper between pin 30 and 87a on the K3 (high beam relay) to keep the lows on when the highs switch on.

[MustBeNice]

Yea I ended up doing this and worked fine for the passenger side but my driver side high beam isn’t working. I’ve swapped bulbs didn’t work, swapped fuses didn’t work, connections all look fine, if it was a relay I believe both sides wouldn’t work?. Need to grab a multimeter and check if it’s getting to proper power.

if anyone has any suggestions or ideas I would really appreciate it

[Northern]

check for 12v on the power side and GND on the other and that should give you a direction to chase the wiring.

[MustBeNice]

Meant to give an update, but after picking up a multimeter seems I just used the wrong wire. I thought both wires got power but was wrong. Also I used the same one positionally as the passenger side but that was wrong I guess. Works great now. However I need to do the relay jump thing to get both lights to stay on but don’t really like the sound of jumping something in the fuse box. Is there a way where I can get the correct relays or swap something to make this cleaner?

[reelizmpro]

Hella included a relay that did exactly this with their ellipsoid retrofit kit they offered back in the day. I have it in my M3 but it's not labeled like ordinary relays. I'd have to check underneath to see if there is a diagram but people have been using the jumper method for decades.

[Panici]

From my build thread Post 192.

My method if you don't have foglights installed on your car.

March 2018 - Ellipsoid / Projector Install


Way back in Post 103 (link to post), I bought a used set of ellipsoids and tore them down.
Then in Post 127 (link to post), I rebuilt the lights using new ellipsoid adjusters.

I've finally gotten around to installing the lights, although I still need to install the beauty rings and mount the ballasts.

I developed my own method to keep the lowbeams on with the highbeams, namely grabbing lowbeam power from the (currently unused foglight) relay socket.
I modified the low beam relay, which can be easily replaced to reverse the modification.

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