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 $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 $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.

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 record low of -15°F on file. 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 (electricity here runs 12.52¢/kWh). Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is longer than the 15-year equipment life, leaving the 15-year total $7,255 behind.

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 $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 6.6 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 for 57,355 people 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.