Heat Pump Payback in Edgewood, WA
Is a heat pump worth it in Edgewood?
The payback math works in Edgewood on paper, past the equipment's own working life. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $5,500 more up front here. Lower bills claw that back: about $252 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 21.8 years. That's a technicality, not a recommendation, for anyone actually living in Edgewood.
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How cold Edgewood actually gets
Edgewood has a real but manageable winter, 3501 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers rarely ask much of an air conditioner, at 58 cooling degree days. 21.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of 16.7°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.21 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Edgewood sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from Tacoma Met, the closest NOAA station, 6.9 miles out.
The yearly running costs in Edgewood
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 2,762 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $401 a year. Edgewood's gas rate of $17.62 per Mcf, applied to the 36 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $653 a year, against 14.27¢ per kWh for electricity. Buying outright rather than at replacement time stretches payback to longer than the 15-year equipment life. Over 15 years, compared with a like-for-like replacement, the heat pump leaves you $1,720 behind.
How sensitive Edgewood's result is to prices
Gas would only overtake the heat pump in Edgewood if electricity rose past 23.5¢/kWh from 14.27¢, or gas fell under $10.71 per Mcf from $17.62. A useful quote test for Edgewood: the heat pump is worth it within a decade if it costs less than $2,520 more than replacing the furnace and AC, and within 7 years if the gap is under $1,764.
Electric resistance heat in Edgewood, compared
Gas isn't universal in Edgewood, many houses run on electric heat already. Against electric-resistance heat, baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance, the case for switching gets stronger here. Switching saves about $875 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 11.4 years.
Where Edgewood ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, Edgewood's winter puts it at rank 1772 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2585 for population, 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
Next step if you live in Edgewood
Edgewood, Washington is home to about 13,496 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 Edgewood, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Edgewood's 3.21 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Edgewood's 21.2°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.