I'll touch on the solar panel. We used to have an in-ground pool before tearing it out to put a fire pit in its place. We didn't use a solar panel for similar reasons that Eric doesn't. They were a bitch to roll up and in our case and pool location, frogs would hide and die in panel when rolled up, pine needles got stuck in them--it was a mess.
A little side anecdote. The pool at our house was installed when the house was built in 1985. For some odd reason, they landscaped it in such a way that it was surrounded by prickly bushes on the shallow end. I'm not sure what kind of bushes they were, but when the wind blew, these prickly thorns would fall into the shallow end and whenever you walked in the shallow end, they would stick in your feet. If you were throwing a ball around in the pool and it went into those bushes. Good luck... I don't know why it took us three years after moving in to get rid of them.