Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Edmonds, WA
This one's marginal in Edmonds: it only clears if you stay long enough. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. That premium is recovered through $318 of lower running costs every year, landing the payback clock at roughly 11 years. It's a genuine toss-up here — Edmonds's numbers don't point clearly either way.
Edmonds's weather, in the numbers that matter
Degree days tell the story here: Edmonds racks up 4489 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers rarely ask much of an air conditioner, with 200 cooling degree days on the cooling side. 18°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 12.9°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.13 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Edmonds needs the cold-climate class of unit: past a 25°F design temperature a standard heat pump falls back on resistance backup often enough to eat the savings. These numbers come from SNOHOMISH CO (PAINE FD) AP, the closest NOAA station, 7.4 miles out.
Edmonds's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 3,632 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $543 a year on electricity. Edmonds's gas rate of 17.62 per Mcf, applied to the 47 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $861 a year, against 14.27¢ per kWh for electricity. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 42.4 years; over 15 years the net position sits $1,273 ahead.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Plenty of homes in Edmonds 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. About $1,116 a year comes back this way, enough that the 7.2-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Edmonds against the rest of the country
Among 3206 cities, Edmonds's winter puts it at rank 1203 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 960 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
What to do with this number in Edmonds
Edmonds, Washington is home to about 42,871 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 Edmonds, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Edmonds's 3.13 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Edmonds's 18°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.