This research paper addresses the challenges of high upfront cost, maintaining vacuum, limited configurations and manufacturers, and fluid thermal retention in the evacuated receiver tube used in parabolic trough collector. These challenges affect the collectors cost and efficiency, which lowers its acceptance for the industrial market. Two attempts have been made to overcome this issue: developing an in-house evacuated tube of the specific configuration with locally available materials to reduce the cost. Furthermore, a novel porous insert is designed and examined inside the tube to improve fluid thermal retention, which will enhance the overall efficiency of the collector. An in-house developed evacuated tube with a notched circular ring porous insert is examined experimentally. The experimental tests were conducted using a manually tracked mechanism with a 2.36 m² aperture area and a 0.50 m focal length, utilizing water as the heat transfer fluid. Performance was evaluated with and without inserts at varying mass discharge rates (0.04, 0.06, and 0.08 kg/s), considering parameters such as Nusselt number, outlet fluid temperature, heat gain and thermal efficiency. The results demonstrate that the receiver tube with inserts significantly outperforms the plain tube (without insert). At higher mass flow rates, the insert-enhanced thermal efficiency is 31.2% and 20.46% in the Nusselt number. Also, a higher outlet fluid temperature is obtained in a tube with an insert, indicating improved thermal retention. This study establishes that incorporating novel inserts and developing in-house evacuated tube can be a viable solution for optimizing the cost and performance of the collector.