I don't know whether an inside pond would work in your climate but I suppose with skylights instead of open screening, it would. Mine functions to help cool the downstairs of the house, it is open to the sky and the heat is sucked up from the hall and from a bedroom terrace above. It gets sun for an hour or two in the summer and the plants do much better then. In the winter, it's light but no direct sun. The boxes on the wall are the filters, water is pumped from the skimmer up through gravel and the plant roots and then falls back to the pond. It splashes a bit and I've got old driftwood logs to stop some of that. It's not a big problem because, well, this is the tropics and water doesn't do as much damage here. It's warm, it dries and the floors are concrete tiles anyway. We don't worry as much about water getting inside here as you do in the north.
This was taken in May and the sun is already high enough to shine on the filter boxes. The cichlids in the pond seem dazzled by the sunlight every year at first, they don't come up to eat while the sun is on the water.
This was taken before I put the driftwood up to block some of the splash.
