Will a heat pump pay off in Beverly, MA?

Beverly technically pencils out, but only past the point the equipment would need replacing anyway. $3,500 is what Beverly would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Lower bills claw that back: about $107 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 32.8 years. Beverly's own numbers say this pencils out only in theory, not in practice.

The climate behind Beverly's payback figure

5701 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Beverly has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 667 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: 10.9°F here (record low -0.9°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.96 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, Beverly sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, BEVERLY MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, 4.2 miles from Beverly.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,877 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,642 a year. That compares with roughly 59 Mcf a year of gas at Beverly's 25.06 per-Mcf rate — about $1,749 a year — against a local electricity rate of 30.15¢/kWh. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 126.5 years; over 15 years the net position sits $1,900 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Beverly, compared

Not every home in Beverly 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. Switching saves about $2,971 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 2.7 years.

Beverly against the rest of the country

Beverly lands at position 319 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 950 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.

Next step for 43,223 people in Beverly

About 43,223 people live in Beverly, Massachusetts, 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.

Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.

More on how this number was built

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Beverly's 2.96 seasonal COP and payback figure. Beverly's 10.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.