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Indonesia is a tropical area and located under the equator line with more than six hours of sunlight a day or about 2400 hours a year. Solar energy has an intensity between 0.6-0.7 kW/m2 and has a potential of 207.8 GWe (electric). This potential can be utilized to reduce the use of fossil energy by harvesting solar energy and transferring it in a helical coil heat exchanger (HCHE) type. This study aims to develop a special proposed heat exchanger design to collect solar thermal energy. As the energy supply is intermittent, a thermal energy storage system is installed. The design of HCHE has coil diameter of 10 mm with thickness of the tube 0.5 mm. HCHE performance test was performed by feeding water to the heat exchanger at a flow rate of 0.006 kg/s where the inlet water temperatures was 27.2˚C. At the outlet, the average temperature was 32.3˚C. During the test, the maximum temperature can be reached by the system was 269.4˚C. This indicates that the solar thermal collector design is working and potentially can be scale-up for energy generating system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]