Listen to Swisscheese! Not the last post from him lol.
It's not quite as easy as just whipping out a holesaw, mixing up ppms or whatevers and sticking a CO2 bottle under everything.
The first thing you should probably do is get rid of the partner. Rule #1 is NEVER tell ANYONE what you're doing. Sometimes it's necessary to include others..as in maybe a large co-op, investors, employees...trimmers...but those are all only necessary in large laborious scenarios. Yours is not.
The second thing you have to do is listen to Swisscheese. Read all you can. Read stickies, journals..join other sites too. I don't know if they make a "Hooked on Aerophonics" series of books.
At the rate you're going now even with implementing your 3 story system you're gonna end up with 16 plants that each yield about 2 grams.
I'm not real familiar with micro grows but 3 levels in 5'6"??
Maybe you could get away with two levels. The bottom for flowering and the top for cuttings/veg.
You don't need 2 separate flowering chambers to stagger a crop. I'm still having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around all of this though.
If it were ME...I'd put a 400 in there with maybe 4 plants..2 to start and add 2 a month later. When you harvest the first two add two more. You could harvest 2 plants per month. Not on one res though. BUT...you'd still need somewhere to veg them. You'd need a bit of room for that.
OR..
just put one or two plants in there and SCROG them. Plant it/them in coco/pearlite.
And that takes us to "his" last post...
"Good luck!"
PEACE!