Heat Pump Payback in Dover, NH
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. $5,500 is what Dover would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. 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.
Checking a different city
Dover is one of 3206 cities covered here, each run through the same model. Search another below.
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 low of 1.4°F in the 2024 station record. 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 yearly running costs in 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 including the old AC (electricity here runs 26.80¢/kWh). Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $8,203 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
What would change Dover's answer
For the verdict in Dover to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 23.3¢/kWh from 26.80¢, or gas climb past $21.42 per Mcf from $18.61. A utility offering a lower heat pump rate can change this. Until then, no quote price makes a heat pump pay back against gas in Dover; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
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 $10,000 spent up front comes back in about 3.6 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.