And the work begins!! YAY!!!

[NWMNMom]

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.

[denanbob]

Thanks for that explanation. I'm going to show it to my husband (who isn't happy with me right now for questioning everything he's doing with this installation, but he's doing it WRONG). LOL! Anyway, thanks so much for the information! Do you have a picture of your DIY reel to share?