Will a heat pump pay off in Greenwood Village, CO?
Here in Greenwood Village, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Greenwood Village 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 $199 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Greenwood Village's numbers say wait.
Why Greenwood Village's climate drives this number
Greenwood Village has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5280 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 919 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -8°F, against a record low of -9.9°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.51 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Greenwood Village 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 CENTENNIAL AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 4.6 miles out.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,327 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,010 a year. Greenwood Village's gas rate of 11.17 per Mcf, applied to the 55 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $811 a year, against 16.53¢ per kWh for electricity. 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 $6,483 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Greenwood Village has gas service. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. About $1,397 a year comes back this way, enough that the 5.7-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Greenwood Village against the rest of the country
Greenwood Village lands at position 513 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 2365 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 Greenwood Village
About 15,288 people live in Greenwood Village, 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.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Greenwood Village's 2.51 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -8°F design temperature, Greenwood Village sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.