Is a heat pump worth it in Kelso?

This one's marginal in Kelso: it only clears if you stay long enough. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. Lower bills claw that back: about $328 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 10.7 years. It's a genuine toss-up here — Kelso's numbers don't point clearly either way.

How cold Kelso actually gets

Degree days tell the story here: Kelso racks up 4565 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers rarely ask much of an air conditioner, with 190 cooling degree days on the cooling side. 19°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 10°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.16 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Kelso sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station KELSO-LONGVIEW AIRPORT, 0.4 miles from Kelso — the closest one on record.

The month-to-month numbers for Kelso

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 3,658 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $545 a year on electricity. Kelso's gas rate of 17.62 per Mcf, applied to the 48 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $873 a year, against 14.27¢ per kWh for electricity. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs about 41.2 years, for a 15-year net position $1,416 ahead.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Not every home in Kelso has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Kelso's answer improves. About $1,140 a year comes back this way, enough that the 7-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.

Where Kelso ranks in this dataset

Kelso lands at position 1125 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 2688 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.

What to do with this number in Kelso

Kelso, Washington is home to about 12,737 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 Kelso, 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 Kelso's figure comes from

Every constant behind this page — the 3.16 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. At a 19°F design temperature, Kelso sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.