Absorber Roof  is an open source, crowd funded development platform for solar thermal collectors.

Its aim is to reduce the cost of collectors and find ways that they can be implemented in places and by people who would otherwise be unable to afford a manufactured product.

By reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency,  other applications for solar heat will also become viable.

This is particularly important for their integration into co-generation systems using ORC (organic rankine cycle)  or other low grade heat engines.

Below is the first generation collector. It is very durable,  has a very low material cost and performs satisfactorily given the limitations it was built under.

There are many avenues for further development. In particular a number of new aluminium extrusion profiles that could inable easy assembly with basic tools.  This will happen when funds becomes avalible. - we are talking thousands of dollars, not tens of thousands.