Hi Brad,
I have an older RQ. I love the floor plan and the ability to raise the shades and have views on three sides of both the living area and the bedroom. When you are in the wilderness it is fantastic. Or you can put them down and have privacy when you are on a parking lot. They also have a good size dry bathroom. They are very stable and tow with no fishtailing. I tow mine behind an F-350 without equalizer bars.
But they are heavy and they catch a lot of wind. You will need a 3/4 ton or equivalent tow vehicle. Your fuel economy with any kind of a gasoline powered tow vehicle will be 8 to 12 miles per gallon and that depends on if you are towing into a wind or with it. I had a diesel truck once and it would get 12 to 14 mpg. On my run to Arizona last winter I fought a 25 to 30 mph headwind for about 600 miles and was down to 7 mpg running 62 mph.
The ones without the front cargo box option have limited room for an extra
battery. Without that storage there is no place for long items like brooms, mops or fishing rods. I carry my broom propped behind the toilet stool and it falls over when travelling. There is a lot of other storage though.
The front battery/tank cover, while it looks good, has a lid on top that funnels all of the rain water that falls on the lid so that it drips on top of the
battery.
It is a four season trailer BUT the ONE
BATTERY that comes with the trailer WILL NOT run the
furnace blower all night long on a cold night. You will wake up at 3:00am and the blower will be just about stopped and the battery totally drained down to about 11 volts. How well I know. You WILL need a
generator and I don't like their option of putting one under the front of the trailer where it is difficult to get to it to service, and it has the potential to leak exhaust fumes under the trailer. That leaves you with the choice of a portable which must be loaded and unloaded each time you use it. My
generator runs about 6 hours on a tank of gas. On a really cold night I leave it running and go to bed with an electric space heater going. It runs out of gasoline and the battery will carry the
furnace blower on through till morning. If you have the front storage compartment there would be enough room for four of those six volt golf cart batteries. That would take you through a couple of nights.
All of that means the
generator will need to be one of the few
light enough to lift and move but still have enough power to run the Air Conditioner or
microwave. The reason it must be loaded and unloaded is a generator cannot be stored or run in the rain. (unless you have a really good life insurance policy).
Which reminds me of one of my pet peeves about the Bigfoots: They know they will be towed mostly with pickup trucks but they put that front jack stand so close to the front that you cannot let your tailgate down to load and unload items, or your tailgate will be damaged by the top of the jack stand. (that means you have to get your wife to lift that generator over the top of the tailgate)
When loaded for camping you have close to 3,000 lbs on each 3,500 pound
axle. That coupled with the "made in China" bearings they put in them at the factory puts you at a lot more risk of a bearing failure. When a wheel bearing goes out a long way from home beside the highway you have all kinds of logistical problems. Ask me how I know. I really wish they would put 5,200 pound capacity axles under them. Not because you will ever be carrying that much
weight but because the bearings are about twice as big and a bearing failure is much less likely.
All of that being said: I can't find another trailer or floor plan that I like better than the Bigfoot 25B25RQ.
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