When cut, I bleed orange parasympathetically,” jokes Tony Pivo, founder of Solar Van Man—a wink to the orange antifreeze used to winterize recreational vehicles. For Pivo, it’s not wordplay—it’s how he’s wired: charged to roam, recharge, and find his calm in motion.
Pivo, a Barrington resident for 15 years, is an RV solar installation specialist dedicated to high-performance off-grid energy systems. Their Volo shop is soon expanding into a four-bay VanEnergy™ facility at Outrig Commerce Park. Serving “boondockers”—travelers who demand 120-volt comfort wherever they park, but don’t want to run their generator, Solar Van Man is for those who yearn to live untethered, silently.
“No one likes a smelly genny,” Pivo quips about the stench of RV generators.
Born from generations of wunderlusters, Pivo comes from a long line that cannot sit still.
“The joke in our family is that if you talk about going somewhere, great grandmother is standing at the door with her purse and hat,” he says.
It was no surprise then that one summer in 1977, family members pulled up to his parents’ Crystal Lake home in a converted early-’60s Greyhound bus—a former Gospel choir eight-bunk touring coach his uncle owned—and parked something into Pivo’s heart that never quite left.
Since then, Pivo has countless miles across three continents with four RVs, from long-distance hauls to extended boondocking and multi-week trips in the U.S., New Zealand, and Europe.
So, after 30 years of selling technical engineering solutions, with the past 16 in power generation, EV manufacturing, and power electronics, Pivo felt it was the right time to scale back his corporate duties and launch his own power-electronics installation company.
“I want to be that guy whose dreams are his work,” he says. Enter Solar Van Man—but first, a reality check. “Rule number one: solar doesn’t power anything in your coach. Solar charges batteries, which power appliances,” he explains. “Rule number two: 100W of panel only returns approximately 30 amps of energy to your coach during the average Midwest sunny summer day. Your small solar array of 220W panels is not going to allow your batteries to stay charged while running air conditioning 20 hours a day at Burning Man—unless you are driving a rolling battery box or carrying a massive portable ground solar array to supplement your roof system.”
Translation: “You need a charging plan that aligns with your energy consumption,” Pivo says. “How you camp determines what your RV setup needs. Do you ‘run and gun’ or ‘sit and sip?’” From there, Pivo designs integrated systems engineered around lifestyle rather than ego. “The goal is not to sell the largest system possible, but the right system for each RV and owner,” he promises. “We create solutions so clients can run electrical appliances without running a generator. We allow them to recharge their batteries while driving. We calculate how much energy you want, how often you’d like to move your camper, and how much solar, battery, and recharging power you’ll need. After that, we understand your budget, install that system, and you go camping.”
That right system, it turns out, is also cleaner for the environment, and Pivo has little patience for the myth otherwise. “It’s science,” he explains. The smaller the fossil fuel generation source, the dirtier the emissions per kilowatt generated. A single cylinder diesel generator is about as inefficient and filthy as it gets. Utility-scale electricity, by contrast, even when generated by coal, is cleaner than the cleanest fossil-fuel RV generator. “If you charge your Lithium batteries at home before leaving, your camping carbon footprint is substantially smaller than when running your generator,” he preaches. Then there’s the camp environment.
“Whether you’re CrackerDocking, WalDocking (camping overnight for free at Cracker Barrel or Walmart), or parked at the dead end of a road on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land that only one other camper found, do you want to be the loud, smelly RV? No!” says Pivo. For those who want to go the distance, Solar Van Man builds systems capable of running air conditioning in the desert on roof solar alone, supplemented by a portable ground array when needed. The ceiling, Pivo says, is limited only by your wallet and your cargo-carrying capacity. “Do you run a 70-inch plasma, two ACs, and Starlink 16 hours a day? We can build that system,” he says. “Would you like to microwave last night’s dinner without waking up everyone in the lot?” We’re like a speed shop for energy; except the question the cool kids are asking these days isn’t ‘How fast can I go?’ It’s ‘How long can I run my air conditioner with my generator?’”
But ask Pivo what all of this is really about, and he puts the smart talk aside for the moment. “Collapsing into my own bedding, so exhausted that it’s a race to the pillow before sleep overcomes me—that’s the end to every perfect day,” he says. “Where I cannot hike another step or dance another jig before sleeping so deeply, I momentarily forget where I am when I wake.” He’s woken up that way on New Zealand’s South Island in a C-Class, on mountain passes in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana in a 33- foot bumper pull, and once cracked open his trailer door in Yellowstone’s Slough Creek—and quickly slammed the door shut before getting horned by stampeding bison. That place, as he calls it, and places like it, are exactly why Solar Van Man was built. “We exist so you spend more time camping,” Pivo says. “That’s it. You call; we haul. That’s all.”
For more information about Solar Van Man, visit solarvanman.com. A longtime environmental advocate, Pivo is also the author of Miervaldis and the Mute Swan, available on Amazon.