Heat Pump Payback in Groton, CT
Is a heat pump worth it in Groton?
Groton 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 $5,500. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $277 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Groton's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
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Groton is one of 3206 cities covered here, each run through the same model. Search another below.
Groton's weather, in the numbers that matter
Groton has a real but manageable winter, 4932 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 620 cooling degree days. 14°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of 7°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.04 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Groton sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from Groton-New London Airport, the closest NOAA station, 0.9 miles out.
Groton's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,108 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,381 a year on electricity. Groton's gas rate of $16.83 per Mcf, applied to the 51 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $1,104 a year, against 29.78¢ per kWh for electricity. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $9,656 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
The break-even point in Groton
For the verdict in Groton to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 22.6¢/kWh from 29.78¢, or gas climb past $22.22 per Mcf from $16.83. 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 Groton; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Plenty of homes in Groton heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Against electric-resistance heat, baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance, the case for switching gets stronger here. Switching saves about $2,578 a year here, a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils, so the extra $10,000 spent up front comes back in about 3.9 years.
Where Groton ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, Groton's winter puts it at rank 831 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 3165 for population, 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Deciding what's next in Groton, CT
Groton, Connecticut is home to about 10,160 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 Groton, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Where Groton's figure comes from
Every constant behind this page, the 3.04 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. Groton's 14°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here, see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.