Visible light communication (VLC), where light is used for illumination and communication simultaneously is considered as one of the enabling technology for the fifth-generation (5G) communication standards. Recently energy harvesting capabilities is proposed to be integrated into VLC system by employing a solar panel as the photodetector instead of using the commonly used photodiode. In this paper, an experiment is conducted to analyse the performance of two types of photodetector at the receiver namely a photodiode and a solar panel. First, the transmitter and receiver circuits are built for both unmodulated scheme and modulated scheme using On-off keying (OOK). The performance of unmodulated scheme is included for comparison purposes. It is shown that the transmission distance obtained by using photodiode is better than the solar panel.