Is a heat pump worth it in Crestwood?
The payback math works in Crestwood on paper, past the equipment's own working life. 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). That premium is recovered through $232 of lower running costs every year, landing the payback clock at roughly 15.1 years. That's a technicality, not a recommendation, for anyone actually living in Crestwood.
How cold Crestwood actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: Crestwood racks up 3639 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1688 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 1.9°F, against a record low of -5.1°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.75 for the recommended cold-climate unit. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Crestwood — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station ST LOUIS DOWNTOWN AIRPORT, 12 miles from Crestwood — the closest one on record.
Crestwood's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 3,351 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $615 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 38 Mcf a year of gas at Crestwood's 14.94 per-Mcf rate — about $847 a year — against a local electricity rate of 12.83¢/kWh. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 58.1 years; over 15 years the net position sits $15 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Crestwood 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. Switching saves about $848 a year here — a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils — so the extra $8,000 spent up front comes back in about 9.4 years.
How Crestwood compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Crestwood comes in at 1719 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2779 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
Deciding what's next in Crestwood, MO
Crestwood, Missouri is home to about 12,239 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 Crestwood, 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
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Crestwood's 2.75 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Crestwood's 1.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.