Is a heat pump worth it in Jackson?
Here in Jackson, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $175 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Jackson's numbers say wait.
Why Jackson's climate drives this number
Jackson has one of the harshest winters in the country — 9281 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers rarely ask much of an air conditioner, at 90 cooling degree days. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -11°F here (record low -20.9°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.44 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Jackson sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from JACKSON HOLE AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 9.1 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Jackson
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 9,631 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,326 a year on electricity. Jackson's gas rate of 11.74 per Mcf, applied to the 97 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $1,151 a year, against 13.66¢ 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 $6,132 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in Jackson has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Jackson's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,900 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 4.2 years.
Jackson against the rest of the country
Among 3206 cities, Jackson's winter puts it at rank 6 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 3052 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.
What to do with this number in Jackson
About 10,680 people live in Jackson, Wyoming, 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.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Jackson's 2.44 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -11°F design temperature, Jackson sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.