I forgot to add an important step: before you start rolling up the solar blanket- manually lift up and pull the end of the blanket up off the water and pull it up over the end top rail to start it. If you just start rolling the blanket up without doing this it will catch under the top rail and tear your straps from the blanket. This all sounds harder and longer than it actually takes; from start to finish- it takes about 3 minutes to reel up the blanket off the pool with two of us- about 6 minutes by myself (5'3" female/14 year old daughter). We had to manually roll and unroll the blanket and lay it on the rail out of the way by hand a couple times before we got the reel installed- do that just once and you'll never complain about the little glitches in rolling it up with the reel/pole!