Heat Pump Payback in Farmington, NM
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Farmington, NM
Here in Farmington, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $5,500 more up front here. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $47 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Farmington's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Checking a different city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Farmington. Look one up here.
Farmington's weather, in the numbers that matter
Degree days tell the story here: Farmington racks up 4915 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1304 cooling degree days on the cooling side. 8.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of 1°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.89 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Farmington 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. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, Four Corners Regional Airport, 2.8 miles from Farmington.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,306 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $799 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 51 Mcf a year at $9.83 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $752 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 14.75¢/kWh). Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $6,201 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
How sensitive Farmington's result is to prices
For the verdict in Farmington to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 13.5¢/kWh from 14.75¢, or gas climb past $10.74 per Mcf from $9.83. A utility offering a lower heat pump rate can change this. Until then, no quote price makes a heat pump pay back against gas in Farmington; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Farmington heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $1,286 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 7.8 years.
How Farmington compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Farmington comes in at 845 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 888 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Deciding what's next in Farmington, NM
Farmington, New Mexico is home to about 46,262 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 Farmington, 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
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Farmington's 2.89 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a 8.1°F design temperature, Farmington sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.