Heat Pump Payback in Longmont, CO
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Longmont, CO
Longmont is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $5,500. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $141 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Longmont's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Compare against another city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Longmont. Look one up here.
Longmont's weather, in the numbers that matter
Degree days tell the story here: Longmont racks up 4970 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 933 cooling degree days on the cooling side. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -2.4°F here (coldest 2024 reading -14.8°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.64 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Longmont, below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station Vance Brand Airport, 3.5 miles from Longmont, the closest one on record.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,767 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $919 a year. That compares with roughly 52 Mcf a year of gas at Longmont's $11.17 per-Mcf rate, about $778 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 16.53¢/kWh. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $7,621 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
What would change Longmont's answer
For the verdict in Longmont to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 13.3¢/kWh from 16.53¢, or gas climb past $13.90 per Mcf from $11.17. 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 Longmont; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
Electric resistance heat in Longmont, compared
Plenty of homes in Longmont heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. Switching saves about $1,361 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 7.3 years.
Where Longmont ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, Longmont's winter puts it at rank 789 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 344 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 Longmont, CO
Longmont, Colorado is home to about 99,818 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 Longmont, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Reading further on this page's numbers
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Longmont's 2.64 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a -2.4°F design temperature, Longmont sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.