Heat Pump Payback in Eagle Pass, TX
Is a heat pump worth it in Eagle Pass?
This one's marginal in Eagle Pass: it only clears if you stay long enough. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,000 more up front here. Lower bills claw that back: about $367 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 8.2 years. It's a genuine toss-up here, Eagle Pass's numbers don't point clearly either way.
Compare against another city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Eagle Pass. Look one up here.
Eagle Pass's weather, in the numbers that matter
687 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Eagle Pass barely has a winter to speak of; the cooling side runs to 4448 cooling degree days, where summers are severe enough that cooling can dominate the annual bill. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is 30.2°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was 21.2°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 3.1 for the recommended standard unit. Eagle Pass's winters don't get cold enough to need the cold-climate premium, a standard unit holds up fine. Source: NOAA station Faith Ranch Airport, 43.9 miles from Eagle Pass, the closest one on record.
Eagle Pass's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 561 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $703 a year on electricity. Eagle Pass's gas rate of $19.42 per Mcf, applied to the 7 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $1,070 a year, against 16.15¢ per kWh for electricity. Priced as a standalone purchase, with a working furnace ripped out early, payback would take longer than the 15-year equipment life. Measured against the like-for-like replacement instead, a household here ends 15 years $2,502 ahead.
The break-even point in Eagle Pass
In Eagle Pass the cooling savings outweigh the extra electricity for heating, so no plausible change in the electricity rate would make the old furnace and AC cheaper to run. A useful quote test for Eagle Pass: the heat pump is worth it within a decade if it costs less than $3,670 more than replacing the furnace and AC, and within 7 years if the gap is under $2,569.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Eagle Pass 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. The saving here runs about $509 a year, which recovers the extra $7,500 spent going electric in roughly 14.7 years.
Where Eagle Pass ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, Eagle Pass's winter puts it at rank 2994 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1394 for population, 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the mildest third of cities covered, where utility rates carry more of the answer than climate does.
Next step if you live in Eagle Pass
Eagle Pass, Texas is home to about 28,768 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 Eagle Pass, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Eagle Pass's 3.1 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Homes in Eagle Pass without gas service should read the electric-resistance comparison instead, the numbers there differ from the gas case above.