Claremont, NH: the heat pump payback math
Here in Claremont, 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). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $283 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Claremont's numbers say wait.
The climate behind Claremont's payback figure
Claremont has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6303 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 568 cooling degree days. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: 1°F here (record low -6°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.72 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Claremont — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station HARTNESS ST (SPNGFLD) ARPT, 9.7 miles from Claremont — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for Claremont
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,868 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,702 a year on electricity. Claremont's gas rate of 18.61 per Mcf, applied to the 66 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $1,419 a year, against 26.80¢ 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 $7,751 behind.
Electric resistance heat in Claremont, compared
Not every home in Claremont has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Claremont's answer improves. About $2,772 a year comes back this way, enough that the 2.9-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
How Claremont compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Claremont comes in at 114 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2640 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Deciding what's next in Claremont, NH
About 13,105 people live in Claremont, New Hampshire, 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.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Where Claremont's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Claremont's 2.72 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Claremont's 1°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.