Should Cañon City switch to a heat pump?

Here in Cañon City, 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 $146 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Cañon City's numbers say wait.

Why Cañon City's climate drives this number

4920 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Cañon City has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 796 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -2.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -12.1°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.65 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Cañon City needs the cold-climate class of unit: past a 25°F design temperature a standard heat pump falls back on resistance backup often enough to eat the savings. Source: NOAA station CHEYENNE MTN AS, 29.2 miles from Cañon City — the closest one on record.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,701 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $889 a year on electricity. Cañon City's gas rate of 11.17 per Mcf, applied to the 51 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $743 a year, against 16.53¢ per kWh for electricity. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs past the 15-year equipment life, for a 15-year net position $5,696 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Plenty of homes in Cañon City heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. 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 $1,341 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 6 years.

Cañon City against the rest of the country

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Cañon City comes in at 841 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2176 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

Next step for 17,193 people in Cañon City

About 17,193 people live in Cañon City, 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.

Reading further on this page's numbers

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Cañon City's 2.65 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a -2.2°F design temperature, Cañon City sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.