Heat Pump Payback in Kenmore, NY
Should Kenmore switch to a heat pump?
In Kenmore, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. $5,500 is what Kenmore would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $296 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Kenmore's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Not the city you meant?
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Kenmore. Look one up here.
Kenmore's weather, in the numbers that matter
Kenmore has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment, 5278 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 831 cooling degree days. 6.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of 3°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.85 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Kenmore 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 Buffalo Niagara International, the closest NOAA station, 7.1 miles out.
Kenmore's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,689 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,577 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 55 Mcf a year at $17.58 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $1,281 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 29.22¢/kWh). Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $9,943 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
The break-even point in Kenmore
For the verdict in Kenmore to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 22.4¢/kWh from 29.22¢, or gas climb past $22.97 per Mcf from $17.58. 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 Kenmore; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in Kenmore has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Kenmore's answer improves. About $2,643 a year comes back this way, enough that the 3.8-year payback clears the $10,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Kenmore against the rest of the country
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Kenmore comes in at 518 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 2400 by population, where 1 is largest. 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 Kenmore
Kenmore, New York is home to about 14,936 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 Kenmore, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
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 Kenmore's 2.85 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a 6.1°F design temperature, Kenmore sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.