Company catalogues are accidental time capsules. Nobody designs them for historians — they are sales documents, printed, shipped and superseded. But leaf through a quarter-century of Solimpeks print, from the early-2000s editions to the 2026 catalogue, and you can watch an industry change its mind about what heat should look like.
The 2000s: hot water, plainly
The company behind those early catalogues was brand new — Solimpeks was established in Konya in 2001 — and the pages reflected what solar heating meant at the time: making domestic hot water, as simply as possible. Thermosiphon systems were at the heart of the offer, the family that lives on today as the TSM line. The idea they embody is the era in miniature: no pump, no controller, no electronics — a collector, a tank above it, and physics doing the circulation. A catalogue could explain the whole product in a page, because the product asked nothing of the house except a sunny roof. Forced circulation systems, with their pumps and controllers, were the sophisticated option further back in the book.
2008: the year electricity arrives
Then comes the archive's clearest turning point. In 2008 a new kind of product enters the range: Volther (today's PV-T Hybrid Panels), a PVT hybrid collector producing electricity and heat from the same square metre of roof. It is the moment "solar" stops meaning only hot water in these pages. From here on, the catalogues have to talk about two energies at once — and about buildings that use them together.
The 2010s: from products to systems
Across the following decade the catalogues thicken, and what they sell changes shape. Single collectors give way to packaged systems — collector, tank, pump station and controller designed to work as one — and the engineering conversation shifts from "how much sun" toward efficiency, certification and integration with the rest of a building's heating. The language turns international, too, as exports grow toward the 96+ countries Solimpeks products reach today.
2026: a system book
Set the 2026 catalogue beside its early-2000s ancestor and the distance is obvious. What began as a booklet about heating water is now, in effect, a book about building energy: flat-plate collectors still, but alongside PVT hybrids, Solimpeks heat pumps, storage tanks and the hybrid systems that tie them all together. The thermosiphon that opened the story is still in the range — some ideas are simply finished — but it now shares its pages with technologies that did not exist as products when the first of these catalogues went to print.
That, perhaps, is the archive's real lesson. The sun has not changed in twenty-five years. What changed is how much of a building we expect it to run.
If a drawer at your distributorship holds a decade of old Solimpeks catalogues, the Newsroom archive would love a scan.