Heat Pump Payback in Cody, WY
Cody, WY: the heat pump payback math
Cody is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $5,500 more up front here. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $153 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Cody's numbers say wait.
Checking a different city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Cody. Look one up here.
The climate behind Cody's payback figure
Cody has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment, 6680 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 571 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is -22°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -32.1°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.3 for the recommended cold-climate unit. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Cody, below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station Yellowstone Regional Airport, 2 miles from Cody, the closest one on record.
Cody's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 7,354 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,071 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 70 Mcf a year at $11.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $918 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 13.66¢/kWh). With running costs higher every year, there is no payback at any purchase price; over 15 years, against a like-for-like replacement, a household here would end $7,799 behind.
What would change Cody's answer
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Cody if electricity fell to 11.5¢/kWh (from 13.66¢) or gas rose above $13.94 per Mcf (from $11.74). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Cody, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
Electric resistance heat in Cody, compared
Not every home in Cody has gas service. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $1,341 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 7.5 years.
How Cody compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Cody comes in at 66 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 3110 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 Cody
About 10,391 people live in Cody, Wyoming, 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.
More on how this number was built
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Cody's 2.3 seasonal COP and payback figure. Cody's -22°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here, see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.