To reduce wood drying energy consumption,the authors developed a solar drying kiln for drying wood.They fixed heat pipe and holistic collectors,and used paraffin to improve heat collecting and storing capacity.The kiln was used to dry a stack of poplar lumber and compared it with air and conventional kiln dried poplar lumber.The results showed that the heat utilization efficiency for holistic and heat pipe collectors were 22.2% and 62.4% respectively.The solar drying process had a faster drying speed and was less dependent on the weather.It was also noted that the solar drying process had about a 70.9% energy savings compared with conventional drying.