Is a heat pump worth it in Edgewood?

This one's marginal in Edgewood: it only clears if you stay long enough. 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). Lower bills claw that back: about $252 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 13.9 years. It's a genuine toss-up here — Edgewood's numbers don't point clearly either way.

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 record low of 16.7°F on file. 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 month-to-month numbers for 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 its running cost near $653 a year, against 14.27¢ per kWh for electricity. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 53.6 years; over 15 years the net position sits $280 ahead.

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 $8,000 spent up front comes back in about 9.1 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 for 13,496 people 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.