The bottles are on level plane, hell they could be 5' difference in elevation, your pump would just work harder. To answer you question on the hoses, there are only 2, take a look at the photos above in post #7, there is 1 house that goes into your dirty infiltered beaker, it attached to the inlet on the fast cap filter, thats the tubing nipple on the outer edge of the filter, the next line attached to the center pipe nipple on the filter, thats the suction port, the other end of it goes to your pump. SUPER simple and fast as hell my friend!