Evans, CO: the heat pump payback math
Evans is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. 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 $220 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Evans's numbers say wait.
The climate behind Evans's payback figure
5932 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Evans has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 814 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -6°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -29°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.56 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Evans — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. These numbers come from GREELEY-WELD COUNTY ARPT, the closest NOAA station, 8.5 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Evans
Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 5,867 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,085 a year. Evans's gas rate of 11.17 per Mcf, applied to the 62 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $864 a year, against 16.53¢ per kWh for electricity. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $6,802 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Plenty of homes in Evans heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Evans's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,573 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.1 years.
How Evans compares nationally
Evans lands at position 259 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1756 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
What to do with this number in Evans
About 22,394 people live in Evans, Colorado, 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.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Reading further on this page's numbers
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Evans's 2.56 seasonal COP and payback figure. Evans's -6°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.