Is a heat pump worth it in Glens Falls?

Glens Falls is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. 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. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $611 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Glens Falls's numbers say wait.

Why Glens Falls's climate drives this number

Glens Falls has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6389 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 507 cooling degree days. -6°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -8°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.56 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Glens Falls 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, FLOYD BENNETT MEMO AIRPORT, 2.6 miles from Glens Falls.

Glens Falls's running-cost comparison, in dollars

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,319 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,973 a year. Glens Falls's gas rate of 17.58 per Mcf, applied to the 67 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $1,362 a year, against 29.22¢ 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 $12,667 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Glens Falls, compared

Gas isn't universal in Glens Falls — many houses run on electric heat already. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $2,946 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 2.7 years.

Glens Falls against the rest of the country

Glens Falls lands at position 101 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 2451 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 Glens Falls

About 14,455 people live in Glens Falls, New York, 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.

Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Glens Falls's 2.56 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Glens Falls's -6°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.