Solar cooling turns out to be a feasible method to reduce the electricity consumption of air conditioning systems in buildings. In this work, an air-cooled single effect absorption chiller and a solar air conditioning system were developed to evaluate the feasibility and annual performance of an air-cooled solar cooling system for residential buildings. This study was performed in two stages. At the first stage, an air-cooled single effect absorption chiller was fabricated and tested under a broad range of steady-state conditions. The feasibility of the proposed chiller was validated experimentally and the influence of different operating conditions was also investigated. At the second stage, the energy performance of a solar air conditioning system with the proposed chiller was investigated for residential cooling application. The results show that the studied absorption chiller can meet about 65% of the total cooling load of the building with an average COPth of about 0.61.