Heat Pump Payback in Commerce City, CO
Commerce City, CO: the heat pump payback math
Commerce City is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $5,500. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $201 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Commerce City's numbers say wait.
Checking a different city
Commerce City is one of 3206 cities covered here, each run through the same model. Search another below.
The climate behind Commerce City's payback figure
Degree days tell the story here: Commerce City racks up 5203 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1076 cooling degree days on the cooling side. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is -9.9°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -16.1°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.46 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Commerce City needs the cold-climate class of unit: past a 25°F design temperature a standard heat pump falls back on resistance backup often enough to eat the savings. These numbers come from Denver International Airport, the closest NOAA station, 8 miles out.
Commerce City's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,356 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,037 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 54 Mcf a year of gas at Commerce City's $11.17 per-Mcf rate, about $836 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 16.53¢/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 $8,517 behind.
What would change Commerce City's answer
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Commerce City if electricity fell to 12.4¢/kWh (from 16.53¢) or gas rose above $14.88 per Mcf (from $11.17). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Commerce City, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Gas isn't universal in Commerce City, many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Commerce City's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,371 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 7.3 years.
How Commerce City compares nationally
Commerce City lands at position 560 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 554 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step if you live in Commerce City
About 70,245 people live in Commerce City, Colorado, 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.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
More on how this number was built
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Commerce City's 2.46 seasonal COP and payback figure. Commerce City's -9.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.