A portable and hybrid solar-powered membrane distillation (SPMD) system has been designed and developed. The current study was conducted at College of Engineering, King Saud University, Riyadh – Saudi Arabia. The hybrid system works on the zero energy concept which does not require external energy, and only utilizes solar energy for its operation. The Memsys V-MEMD unit has been successfully integrated with the solar-thermal collector and the solar-PV system. In this study, a small-scale test based on one-day operation of the system was conducted in manual mode. The heat pump was operated to increase the distillate production by preheating the brackish water before fed into Memsys V-MEMD unit. The test results showed that the portable SPMD system ran perfectly by only utilizing solar energy and without external energy from the grid. The average distillate output rate was approximately 11.53 L/h (Test on 18 Feb 2013) with the maximum level of 15.94 L/h (at noon time). The total volume of distillate output on that day was about 70 L with an approximate conductivity of 4.7 μS/cm. This distillate volume can be considered as a low output. However, due to its modularity, the capacity of the system can be easily increased to meet the water demand by increasing the number of the Memsys “effect stages”. The magnitude of the distillate flux was in the range of 1.5–2.6 L/m2 h, which is comparable to other research studies. Other tests were also conducted to study the performance of the thermal collector. The solar energy converting efficiency (in percentage) of the thermal collector was quite low. The mean value of the solar energy converting efficiency from the two tests was approximately 33.6%.