Should El Campo switch to a heat pump?
This one's marginal in El Campo: 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). That premium is recovered through $268 of lower running costs every year, landing the payback clock at roughly 13 years. It's a genuine toss-up here — El Campo's numbers don't point clearly either way.
El Campo's weather, in the numbers that matter
953 heating degree days pile up here every year, so El Campo barely has a winter to speak of; the cooling side runs to 2780 cooling degree days, where summers are severe enough that cooling can dominate the annual bill. 19°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 3.16 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. El Campo 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 WHARTON REGIONAL AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 16.6 miles out.
El Campo's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 764 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $506 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 10 Mcf a year at 19.42 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $775 a year (electricity here runs 16.15¢/kWh). Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs about 50.3 years, for a 15-year net position $527 ahead.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in El Campo has gas service. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. About $465 a year comes back this way, enough that the 17.2-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
El Campo against the rest of the country
El Campo lands at position 2925 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 2786 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the mildest third of cities covered, where utility rates carry more of the answer than climate does.
What to do with this number in El Campo
El Campo, Texas is home to about 12,176 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 El Campo, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Where El Campo's figure comes from
Every constant behind this page — the 3.16 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. At a 19°F design temperature, El Campo sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.