Should Easton switch to a heat pump?

Here in Easton, 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). Running costs here land $36 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Easton's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Easton's payback figure

4777 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Easton has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 985 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: 7°F here (record low 1°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.87 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Easton — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station LEHIGH VALLEY INTERNATIONAL A, 12.3 miles from Easton — the closest one on record.

The month-to-month numbers for Easton

Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 4,215 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,049 a year. That compares with roughly 50 Mcf a year of gas at Easton's 15.04 per-Mcf rate — about $1,013 a year — against a local electricity rate of 20.75¢/kWh. Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is longer than the 15-year equipment life, leaving the 15-year total $4,035 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Easton, compared

Plenty of homes in Easton heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $1,726 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 4.6 years.

How Easton compares nationally

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Easton comes in at 970 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 1344 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

Next step for 30,432 people in Easton

About 30,432 people live in Easton, Pennsylvania, and every number on this page is what a contractor would actually work from when quoting a system here — the point isn't to replace that quote, it's to tell you whether to bother asking for one. Here, there's no cost penalty to waiting until your current furnace or AC actually needs replacing.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Easton's 2.87 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Easton's 7°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here — see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.