Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Grantsville, UT
The payback math works in Grantsville on paper, past the equipment's own working life. $3,500 is what Grantsville 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. Lower bills claw that back: about $71 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 49.2 years. That's a technicality, not a recommendation, for anyone actually living in Grantsville.
How cold Grantsville actually gets
5289 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Grantsville has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 1255 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. 17.6°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 10.4°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.12 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Grantsville 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 BOLINDER FIELD TOOELE VALLEY, the closest NOAA station, 6.2 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Grantsville
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,292 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $704 a year. Grantsville's gas rate of 10.19 per Mcf, applied to the 55 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $775 a year, against 13.12¢ per kWh for electricity. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs about 189.8 years, for a 15-year net position $2,433 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Gas isn't universal in Grantsville — many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Grantsville's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,267 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 6.3 years.
Where Grantsville ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Grantsville comes in at 494 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2326 by population, where 1 is largest. 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 Grantsville
Grantsville, Utah is home to about 15,682 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 Grantsville, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Grantsville's 3.12 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Grantsville's 17.6°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.