Should Batavia switch to a heat pump?
Batavia is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. 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. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $320 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Batavia's numbers say wait.
Why Batavia's climate drives this number
Degree days tell the story here: Batavia racks up 5285 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 761 cooling degree days on the cooling side. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: 5°F here (record low 0°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.82 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Batavia sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from GREATER ROCHESTER INTERNATION, the closest NOAA station, 26.8 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Batavia
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,746 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,576 a year on electricity. Batavia's gas rate of 17.58 per Mcf, applied to the 55 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $1,256 a year, against 29.22¢ per kWh for electricity. Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is longer than the 15-year equipment life, leaving the 15-year total $8,306 behind.
Electric resistance heat in Batavia, compared
Gas isn't universal in Batavia — many houses run on electric heat already. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. Switching saves about $2,622 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 3.1 years.
How Batavia compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Batavia's winter puts it at rank 504 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2384 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 15,071 people in Batavia
About 15,071 people live in Batavia, New York, and every number on this page is what a contractor would actually work from when quoting a system here — the point isn't to replace that quote, it's to tell you whether to bother asking for one. Here, there's no cost penalty to waiting until your current furnace or AC actually needs replacing.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Where Batavia's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Batavia's 2.82 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Batavia's 5°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.