Will a heat pump pay off in Fort Collins, CO?

Here in Fort Collins, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Fort Collins would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $203 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Fort Collins's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

How cold Fort Collins actually gets

Fort Collins has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5505 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 915 cooling degree days. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -7.1°F here (record low -22°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.53 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Fort Collins 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 FORT COLLINS LOVELAND AP, the closest NOAA station, 7.2 miles out.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,510 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,040 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 57 Mcf a year at 11.17 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $836 a year (electricity here runs 16.53¢/kWh). Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs past the 15-year equipment life, for a 15-year net position $6,549 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Plenty of homes in Fort Collins heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Fort Collins's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,460 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 5.5 years.

Where Fort Collins ranks in this dataset

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Fort Collins comes in at 370 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 156 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

Next step for 170,924 people in Fort Collins

Fort Collins, Colorado is home to about 170,924 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 Fort Collins, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

Where Fort Collins's figure comes from

Every constant behind this page — the 2.53 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Fort Collins's -7.1°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.