Solar energy has a great potential to give cheap and abundant energy to rural areas of the world, but is the technology ready to be implemented today? This stydy looked at the possibilities to introduce more renewable energy into the local hand-made paper production in Bangladesh. Specifically the potential of solar heated vacuum tubes filled with water as a heat carrier. This type of solar thermal collectors are cheap to produce, relatively efficient at converting both direct and diffuse solar energy into usable energy, and have a very simple construction that do not require a lot of training to handle. The study showed that the collector could convert about 70 % of the energy from the sun into usable energy in the form of hot water circulated in the system. On average in Bangladesh the 5 m2 collector used is expected to have an output of about 25.6 MJ per day (yearly average) and about 4.8 MJ was needed to evaporate 1 kg of water from the drying papers (including the system losses). This can be compared with the old system that used about 8 MJ per kg water evaporated. Finally the study includes a step by step guide into how to build a system like this by locally available material. The only parts that were imported were some measurement equipment and parts of the collector that was not yet available through local distributors. The pump was also not produced in Bangladesh, but a similar pump could be bought by local companies that import this type of equipment.