Heat Pump Payback in Brighton, CO
Should Brighton switch to a heat pump?
Brighton 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 $5,500. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $201 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Brighton's numbers say wait.
Checking a different city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Brighton. Look one up here.
Why Brighton's climate drives this number
5203 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Brighton has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 1076 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -9.9°F here (coldest 2024 reading -16.1°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.46 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Brighton, below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, Denver International Airport, 11.7 miles from Brighton.
Brighton's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,356 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,037 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 54 Mcf a year of gas at Brighton's $11.17 per-Mcf rate, about $836 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 16.53¢/kWh. With running costs higher every year, there is no payback at any purchase price; over 15 years, against a like-for-like replacement, a household here would end $8,517 behind.
What would change Brighton's answer
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Brighton if electricity fell to 12.4¢/kWh (from 16.53¢) or gas rose above $14.88 per Mcf (from $11.17). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Brighton, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Gas isn't universal in Brighton, 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. The saving here runs about $1,371 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 7.3 years.
How Brighton compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Brighton comes in at 564 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 947 by population, where 1 is largest. 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 Brighton
About 43,473 people live in Brighton, Colorado, 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.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Brighton's 2.46 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -9.9°F design temperature, Brighton sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.