Heat Pump Payback in Coeur d'Alene, ID
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Coeur d'Alene, ID
Here in Coeur d'Alene, 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 $5,500 more up front here. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $250 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Coeur d'Alene's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Not the city you meant?
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Coeur d'Alene. Look one up here.
Coeur d'Alene's weather, in the numbers that matter
6151 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Coeur d'Alene has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 556 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -7.6°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -15°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.52 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Coeur d'Alene sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station Coeur D'Alene Air Term Apt, 4.5 miles from Coeur d'Alene, the closest one on record.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,181 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $833 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 64 Mcf a year at $7.69 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $583 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 12.52¢/kWh). Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $9,255 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
What would change Coeur d'Alene's answer
For the verdict in Coeur d'Alene to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 8.3¢/kWh from 12.52¢, or gas climb past $11.60 per Mcf from $7.69. A utility offering a lower heat pump rate can change this. Until then, no quote price makes a heat pump pay back against gas in Coeur d'Alene; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
Electric resistance heat in Coeur d'Alene, compared
Plenty of homes in Coeur d'Alene heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Against electric-resistance heat, baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance, the case for switching gets stronger here. The saving here runs about $1,207 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 8.3 years.
Coeur d'Alene against the rest of the country
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Coeur d'Alene comes in at 170 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 715 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step if you live in Coeur d'Alene
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho is home to about 57,355 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 Coeur d'Alene, 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 2.52 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. At a -7.6°F design temperature, Coeur d'Alene sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.