Quote Originally Posted by RavenNS
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.

I chols a Horizon HV 2000 reel for my pool specifically because it is tall enough to fit OVER my low profile diving board. The reel fits perfectly over my diving board even with the entire 20x40 solar cover rolled up on it. The only negatives to that reel are that it does sag a little in the middle when fully loaded (the manual says that can be solved by drilling extra screws into the post, but I haven't bothered), and that it is a bear to install the first day (well over 20 self-drilling screws without any pre-drilled holes). Totally worth it though.