I decided to bring my system indoors. I did this primarily due to lack of space in my yard, room in my home and the ability to control more aspects of my system such as temperature, air and water quality as well as dramatically increase my growing season.



This is the layout of the room in my basement that I had to use. It offered 125 square feet of useable floor space and just over 8 feet of vertical height.
There were a few constants that I had to take into consideration. To minimize ph, temperature swings and provide any kind of significant impact in my family food budget I knew I needed >300 gallon tank. With the standard grow bed size depth being 6-12 inches depending on what your trying to grow, a 3" x 2' x 4' light foot print and basic plant height requirements I knew designing the system to maximize use of the space and provide the most efficient grow area was going to be a bit of a challenge. But I broke out sketch up 8 and tried a variety of designs until I came up with one that made sense to me.

I also took a look at several guys in Wisconsin doing indoor grows.


and some commercial systems http://www.growfish.com/s-2005.html

I knew my system would be based on a CHOP system with a singular tank and use a bell siphon for the grow beds. But I liked the supplementary tank idea and "flushing' mechanism from Barrelponics

I knew I needed to have at least 2 x as much grow bed as I had tank and that I would need to water each grow bed singularly to avoid over stressing the fish with high water fluctuations and I liked the idea of this indexing valve but didn't really like the idea of more electricity around the system or the electronics to control it.