Heat Pump Payback in Cibolo, TX
Should Cibolo switch to a heat pump?
This one's marginal in Cibolo: it only clears if you stay long enough. $3,000 is what Cibolo would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. That premium is recovered through $336 of lower running costs every year, landing the payback clock at roughly 8.9 years. It's a genuine toss-up here, Cibolo's numbers don't point clearly either way.
Not the city you meant?
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Cibolo. Look one up here.
Cibolo's weather, in the numbers that matter
1011 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Cibolo barely has a winter to speak of; the cooling side runs to 3754 cooling degree days, where summers are severe enough that cooling can dominate the annual bill. 27.3°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of 16.2°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.01 on the standard unit fit for this climate. Cibolo's winters don't get cold enough to need the cold-climate premium, a standard unit holds up fine. These numbers come from Randolph AFB Airport, the closest NOAA station, 3.5 miles out.
The yearly running costs in Cibolo
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 850 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $654 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 11 Mcf a year of gas at Cibolo's $19.42 per-Mcf rate, about $990 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 16.15¢/kWh. Priced as a standalone purchase, with a working furnace ripped out early, payback would take longer than the 15-year equipment life. Measured against the like-for-like replacement instead, a household here ends 15 years $2,039 ahead.
How sensitive Cibolo's result is to prices
In Cibolo the cooling savings outweigh the extra electricity for heating, so no plausible change in the electricity rate would make the old furnace and AC cheaper to run. A useful quote test for Cibolo: the heat pump is worth it within a decade if it costs less than $3,360 more than replacing the furnace and AC, and within 7 years if the gap is under $2,352.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in Cibolo 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. About $545 a year comes back this way, enough that the 13.8-year payback clears the $7,500 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where Cibolo ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Cibolo comes in at 2904 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 1097 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the mildest third of cities covered, where utility rates carry more of the answer than climate does.
Next step if you live in Cibolo
Cibolo, Texas is home to about 37,816 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 Cibolo, 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
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Cibolo's 3.01 seasonal COP and payback figure. Homes in Cibolo without gas service should read the electric-resistance comparison instead, the numbers there differ from the gas case above.