Should Cary switch to a heat pump?
Cary sits right on the fence — how long you'll own the house decides this one. 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). Lower bills claw that back: about $258 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 13.6 years. It's a genuine toss-up here — Cary's numbers don't point clearly either way.
How cold Cary actually gets
2409 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Cary has a mild winter by US standards; the cooling side runs to 2068 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is 18°F, against a record low of 18°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 3.13 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Cary 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. These numbers come from RALEIGH-DURHAM INTERNATIONAL, the closest NOAA station, 8 miles out.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 1,949 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $554 a year on electricity. Cary's gas rate of 16.42 per Mcf, applied to the 25 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $812 a year, against 14.93¢ per kWh for electricity. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 52.3 years; over 15 years the net position sits $368 ahead.
Electric resistance heat in Cary, compared
Not every home in Cary has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Cary's answer improves. About $757 a year comes back this way, enough that the 10.6-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where Cary ranks in this dataset
Cary lands at position 2233 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 146 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the mildest third of cities covered, where utility rates carry more of the answer than climate does.
What to do with this number in Cary
Cary, North Carolina is home to about 182,659 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 Cary, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
More on how this number was built
Every constant behind this page — the 3.13 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Cary's 18°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.