And the work begins!! YAY!!!

We made it ourselves because I didn't want one that mounted to my rails, we don't have a deck on it and I didn't want one that I had to remove and put somewhere else if not mounted- My husband welded 20' of steel pipe to ss bearings attached to steel pipes mounted into the ground/concrete which stand 5.5' high, all of it is about 2.5-3' back from the end of the pool - he put a nice sturdy handle/crank on it to manhandle the big solar blanket off the pool - he manufactured strap loops from seat belting riveted on the blanket and flexible glue - straps are screwed into the steel rod. Its a big thing but does a nice job - that solar blanket is HEAVY. The only thing I would have done differently is gone a bit higher up so the blanket doesn't drag and hang up under the top rail/caps - we fold the sides in a bit to get around this but higher up and it would have solved that I think - too late now, concrete is hard. Could be that other reels have this problem too...don't know, we manually removed/folded our old blanket on the 18' round pool.