India has a huge potential of solar energy as it is gifted with 300 sunny days in most part of the country. The simplest form of harvesting solar energy is to use it for water heating. Most of the solar heating systems developed before were big in size, uses more space, difficult to install and use it for domestic purpose. To make the installation of solar heating systems simple and compact with adequate improvement in performance, a novel sun point collector has been developed. In this paper reduced land use of solar water heating systems by using sun point collector is analysed. A new comparative test on two different types of conventional solar flat plate collector (FPC) and sun point collector (SPC) was also investigated by conducting experiments. A standard glazed flat plate collector and a novel sun point collector are installed in parallel and tested at same working conditions. Results are also presented in terms of daily efficiency versus daily average reduced temperature difference: this allows representing the comparative characteristics of the two collectors when operating under same conditions. © (2014) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.