Will a heat pump pay off in Cheney, WA?

In Cheney, the math is close enough that it comes down to how long you plan to stay. $3,500 is what Cheney 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. That premium is recovered through $344 of lower running costs every year, landing the payback clock at roughly 10.2 years. It's a genuine toss-up here — Cheney's numbers don't point clearly either way.

Cheney's weather, in the numbers that matter

6756 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Cheney has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 300 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -1.3°F, against a record low of -9.4°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.67 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Cheney sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from SPOKANE 17 SSW , the closest NOAA station, 5.7 miles out.

The month-to-month numbers for Cheney

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,407 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $951 a year. That compares with roughly 70 Mcf a year of gas at Cheney's 17.62 per-Mcf rate — about $1,295 a year — against a local electricity rate of 14.27¢/kWh. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 39.2 years; over 15 years the net position sits $1,667 ahead.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Gas isn't universal in Cheney — many houses run on electric heat already. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. Switching saves about $1,546 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 5.2 years.

How Cheney compares nationally

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Cheney comes in at 55 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2699 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 Cheney

Cheney, Washington is home to about 12,700 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 Cheney, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.

More on how this number was built

Every constant behind this page — the 2.67 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Cheney's -1.3°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.