Is a heat pump worth it in Arlington?

This one's marginal in Arlington: it only clears if you stay long enough. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. That premium is recovered through $325 of lower running costs every year, landing the payback clock at roughly 10.8 years. It's a genuine toss-up here — Arlington's numbers don't point clearly either way.

Arlington's weather, in the numbers that matter

Arlington has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5176 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers rarely ask much of an air conditioner, at 107 cooling degree days. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: 10.9°F here (record low 7°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.96 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Arlington — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station ARLINGTON MUNICIPAL ARPT, 0.9 miles from Arlington — the closest one on record.

The month-to-month numbers for Arlington

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,428 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $645 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 54 Mcf a year of gas at Arlington's 17.62 per-Mcf rate — about $970 a year — against a local electricity rate of 14.27¢/kWh. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 41.6 years; over 15 years the net position sits $1,371 ahead.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Plenty of homes in Arlington heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Arlington's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,245 a year here — a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils — so the extra $8,000 spent up front comes back in about 6.4 years.

How Arlington compares nationally

Arlington lands at position 582 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1787 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

What to do with this number in Arlington

Arlington, Washington is home to about 21,959 people, and the figures above are the same ones a local HVAC contractor uses to size and quote a system — this site doesn't guess where a real quote would land, it just tells you whether it's worth asking for one. In Arlington, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

Reading further on this page's numbers

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Arlington's 2.96 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a 10.9°F design temperature, Arlington sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.