Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Aurora, CO

Here in Aurora, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). Running costs here land $199 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Aurora's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Aurora's weather, in the numbers that matter

5188 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Aurora has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 999 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -9.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -13.5°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.48 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Aurora sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE, 1.7 miles from Aurora — the closest one on record.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 5,297 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,016 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 54 Mcf a year at 11.17 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $818 a year (electricity here runs 16.53¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $6,483 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Not every home in Aurora has gas service. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. The saving here runs about $1,369 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.8 years.

Where Aurora ranks in this dataset

Among 3206 cities, Aurora's winter puts it at rank 577 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 51 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

Next step for 403,130 people in Aurora

Aurora, Colorado is home to about 403,130 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 Aurora, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Aurora's 2.48 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Aurora's -9.2°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here — see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.