Is a heat pump worth it in Dover?

In Dover, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. $3,500 is what Dover would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Running costs here land $180 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Dover's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Dover's weather, in the numbers that matter

Dover has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6151 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 522 cooling degree days. 8.8°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 1.4°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.91 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Dover sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from DURHAM 2 N , the closest NOAA station, 2.4 miles out.

The month-to-month numbers for Dover

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,352 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,554 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 64 Mcf a year at 18.61 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $1,373 a year (electricity here runs 26.80¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $6,203 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Gas isn't universal in Dover — many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Dover's answer improves. Switching saves about $2,802 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 2.9 years.

Dover against the rest of the country

Among 3206 cities, Dover's winter puts it at rank 172 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1214 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. 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 Dover

Dover, New Hampshire is home to about 33,909 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 Dover, 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 Dover's 2.91 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Dover's 8.8°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.