Hi Brian,

Sounds like you and your wife are starting a fun adventure together. Commercial level by the sounds of it. I visited a place in Texas that has 4 green houses in production like that and they do very well. The guy there only does the raft system because the lettuces are the fastest growing part of the system and the biggest cash cow to him. He sells at the farmers markets and to the local restaurants who promote organic in their menus.

Ours is for personal and friend use. We're building a system inside our pool house. We have a salt water pool so we don't have the chemical release off the pool but we do have a lot of moisture. I put real plants out there and they required very little watering and did a nice job helping to remove the moisture from the air. The plan is to pump from a 500 gallon fish tank to our 96 sq ft media grow bed (u-shaped due to space confinements), then into the raft system, and back into the tank. I also have a wall of plants (herbs) that will be hung on the outside of the fish tank and trees I'm placing around the system itself. (Some can be part of the system, others (Citrus) cant due to ph issues. The tree part will be a huge trial and error part of the system as we try to figure it all out. 

As I've been reading I've come to wonder if I need a small holding tank in between the media and raft system with a filter pad to catch any of the extra large particulates that may transfer over though the bell siphon. I have a place prepped for it but I haven't put it in yet. We just finished framing the whole thing and I'm waiting for the grow media and pond liner to arrive.

It will be fun to track each others systems and to have someone to bounce ideas off of. Thanks for reaching out.

Talk soon and tell your wife and cute baby I said hi. :)

Kristen