Heat Pump Payback in Kearns, UT
Kearns, UT: the heat pump payback math
Kearns technically pencils out, but only past the point the equipment would need replacing anyway. $5,500 is what Kearns would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. That premium is recovered through $110 of lower running costs every year, landing the payback clock at roughly 50.2 years. Kearns's own numbers say this pencils out only in theory, not in practice.
Compare against another city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Kearns. Look one up here.
Why Kearns's climate drives this number
4667 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Kearns has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1804 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is 19°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was 12.2°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 3.16 for the recommended cold-climate unit. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Kearns, below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, Salt Lake City International, 9 miles from Kearns.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 3,740 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $692 a year on electricity. Kearns's gas rate of $10.19 per Mcf, applied to the 49 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $802 a year, against 13.12¢ per kWh for electricity. Buying outright rather than at replacement time stretches payback to longer than the 15-year equipment life. Over 15 years, compared with a like-for-like replacement, the heat pump leaves you $3,856 behind.
What would change Kearns's answer
This result holds unless electricity climbs above 16.8¢/kWh (it is 13.12¢ now) or gas drops below $7.94 per Mcf (now $10.19); past either point, gas becomes the cheaper fuel in Kearns. When quotes arrive, compare the heat pump price with a like-for-like furnace and AC replacement: at $110 a year saved, a difference under $770 pays back within 7 years here, and under $1,100 within 10.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Kearns heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Kearns's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,165 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 8.6 years.
Where Kearns ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Kearns comes in at 1031 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 1049 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step if you live in Kearns
About 39,398 people live in Kearns, Utah, 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
Every constant behind this page, the 3.16 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. Kearns's 19°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.