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 $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. 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.
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 (record low -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 — against a local electricity rate of 16.53¢/kWh. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $5,621 behind.
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 $8,000 spent up front comes back in about 5.9 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.