Abstract
The simplification of solar thermal systems reduces the possibility of operating trouble and lowers the cost of the initial investment and maintenance. This also leads to increased competitiveness in the energy market. We proposed a spiral-jacketed storage tank that functions both as a heat exchanger and expansion tank, which removes the secondary piping and markedly simplifies the entire system. The new storage tank was designed and manufactured to maintain the same performance as the conventional system and the exiting system was remodelled by adopting the newly proposed storage tank. This experiment was conducted under real conditions over a period of several months. The retrofitted system with the spiral-jacketed storage tank showed good performance that is on a similar level as the previous system having a typical storage tank and heat exchanger.