Should Denver switch to a heat pump?

Here in Denver, 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). The heat pump would cost about $199 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. That's Denver's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Denver's weather, in the numbers that matter

Degree days tell the story here: Denver racks up 5188 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 999 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 -9.2°F, against a record low of -13.5°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.48 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Denver 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. Source: NOAA station BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE, 7.6 miles from Denver — the closest one on record.

Denver's running-cost comparison, in dollars

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,297 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,016 a year on electricity. Denver's gas rate of 11.17 per Mcf, applied to the 54 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $818 a year, against 16.53¢ per kWh for electricity. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs past the 15-year equipment life, for a 15-year net position $6,483 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Gas isn't universal in Denver — many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Denver's answer improves. About $1,369 a year comes back this way, enough that the 5.8-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.

Where Denver ranks in this dataset

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Denver comes in at 576 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 19 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

What to do with this number in Denver

Denver, Colorado is home to about 729,019 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 Denver, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

Where Denver's figure comes from

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Denver's 2.48 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -9.2°F design temperature, Denver sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.