Building integrated solar systems have been considered as a reasonable system for building heating, cooling and hot water supply. Various types of solar collectors, such as plate type, evacuated tube type and solar air collector, have been used as the heat source, whereas adsorption chillers, absorption chillers and desiccant dehumidification systems have been considered to match the above solar heat sources. Now, such sorption chillers are more matured, but their coupling with suitable solar heat source is not well researched. Experimental study has been done in this paper to analyse four kinds of typical solar air-conditioning system with different sorption chillers and solar collectors. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.