There are two main problems of inclined solar water distillation systems. There is not a water film layer enough to facilitate the evaporation of water on the absorber plate, and high temperature of glass cover decreases the amount of condensed water. In this article, an inclined solar water distillation system was designed and tested under actual environmental conditions of Turkey in order to overcome these two main problems. Therefore, with this study, improving of inclined solar water distillation system performance was investigated. The system was tested with four variants: bare plate (BP), shaded bare plate (SBP), black‐cloth wick (BCW), and shaded black‐cloth wick (SBCW). Experimental studies showed that the use of bare cloth wick, shading plate, and both together increase the system efficiency by 3, 2, and 5% respectively. © 2012 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 32: 350‐354, 2013