Will a heat pump pay off in Lebanon, NH?

Here in Lebanon, 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). The heat pump would cost about $315 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Lebanon's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Lebanon's payback figure

Lebanon has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6437 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 569 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -0.9°F, against a record low of -6°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.68 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Lebanon sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station LEBANON MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, 2.6 miles from Lebanon — the closest one on record.

Lebanon's running-cost comparison, in dollars

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,082 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,760 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 67 Mcf a year at 18.61 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $1,445 a year (electricity here runs 26.80¢/kWh). Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is longer than the 15-year equipment life, leaving the 15-year total $8,221 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Not every home in Lebanon has gas service. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $2,806 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 2.9 years.

How Lebanon compares nationally

Among 3206 cities, Lebanon's winter puts it at rank 99 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2355 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 Lebanon, NH

About 15,389 people live in Lebanon, New Hampshire, 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.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

Where Lebanon's figure comes from

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Lebanon's 2.68 seasonal COP and payback figure. Lebanon's -0.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.