Solar water heating (SWH) systems significantly reduce energy use in heating applications; they are becoming more and more common in modern structures. In this work, an exterior compound parabolic concentrator solar collector (XCPCSC) and stratified thermal storage system (STESS) are used to model an active SWH using TRNSYS software for the climate of Chennai, India. The performance characteristics are evaluated by altering the collector area, mass flow rate, different controller techniques, and STESS design based on monthly and annual averaged solar fractions (SF). According to the simulated studies, the optimized system can achieve an SF of 0.97 and meet a hot water demand of 280 l d−1 at 60 °C. By using zero energy usage from conventional resources, this design technique can be used to construct an efficient SWH system. Through similar test settings and experimental data, the suggested TRNSYS model has been validated. A 5% increase in energy is obtained over an evacuated tube solar collector without XCPC when the effect of putting XCPC under evacuated tubes is simulated.