I live in a cold(ish) wet climate, using a blanket is a big plus for saving heat. I knew that from my old donut pool... then when we moved into the new house with a 42' IG pool ( & bought a heat pump), my DH said that he didn't want a cover on the pool because it was "ugly".
well I went along with this for a bit, but it rained every night in May, then almost everyday in June... I was tired of paying extra for heating. I already had solar fish ( btw you can also buy " heat savr", the liquid stuff in the fish, that you can pour in daily & "solar pill", a slow dissolve skimmer product of the same stuff).
Anyway, I got the blanket out the shed & proceeded to unroll it, which is when I discovered, that the blanket was nailed ( with rotton wood) to big PVC pipe & there was no way to roll or unroll the blanket. huge PITA!
I ordered a good solar reel ( waterpik, owned by jandy), & this helped great; but the store had told me that I didn't need to drill holes in the decking to make this work... turns out they were very wrong... I dumped the moving reel in the pool a couple of times.
Finally my DH drilled some holes in the deck for the reel to be screwed into.
( wasn't exactly as close to the pool as I would have liked, but my DH was concerned about cracks forming around the pool walls).

anyway, with the "proper reel" I can get the blanket on & off in about a minute.
This is including the time it takes to fold the deep-end part of the blanket in half because the pool is a lazy "L" & it's quite difficult to make the turn without folding the blanket.
The reel works so well that I can actually swim it on (unrolling & carrying/swimming the heavy blanket back to the deep-end).
So I usually swim it on as my DH gets the kid's floatation devices off & opens up the hot tub.

( I only wish that the diving board wasn't low-profile so that the reel could have been stationed at the deep end instead of the shallow. it would leave more deck space in the shallow end)

Anyway, I find using the reel ( with the 42' blanket) a lot easier than taking my old donut-pool blanket on & off manually.