Cottonwood Heights, UT: the heat pump payback math
In Cottonwood Heights, the extra upfront cost technically comes back, just not before the equipment wears out. 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). Lower bills claw that back: about $110 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 31.9 years. That's a technicality, not a recommendation, for anyone actually living in Cottonwood Heights.
How cold Cottonwood Heights actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: Cottonwood Heights racks up 4667 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1804 cooling degree days on the cooling side. 19°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 12.2°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.16 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Cottonwood Heights 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. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, SALT LAKE CITY INTERNATIONAL, 13.9 miles from Cottonwood Heights.
The month-to-month numbers for Cottonwood Heights
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 3,740 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $692 a year. Cottonwood Heights's gas rate of 10.19 per Mcf, applied to the 49 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $802 a year, against 13.12¢ per kWh for electricity. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 123.2 years; over 15 years the net position sits $1,856 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Gas isn't universal in Cottonwood Heights — many houses run on electric heat already. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $1,165 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 6.9 years.
How Cottonwood Heights compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Cottonwood Heights comes in at 1033 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 1263 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 Cottonwood Heights, UT
Cottonwood Heights, Utah is home to about 32,437 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 Cottonwood Heights, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
More on how this number was built
Every constant behind this page — the 3.16 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Cottonwood Heights's 19°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.