Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Longview, TX
This one's marginal in Longview: it only clears if you stay long enough. $3,500 is what Longview would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Lower bills claw that back: about $320 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 10.9 years. Whether that's worth it in Longview depends on how many years you expect to own the place.
Why Longview's climate drives this number
1656 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Longview has a mild winter by US standards; the cooling side runs to 2742 cooling degree days, where summers are severe enough that cooling can dominate the annual bill. 21°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 10.9°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.2 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Longview sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, EAST TEXAS REGIONAL ARPT, 9.8 miles from Longview.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 1,310 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $589 a year on electricity. Longview's gas rate of 19.42 per Mcf, applied to the 17 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $909 a year, against 16.15¢ per kWh for electricity. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 42.2 years; over 15 years the net position sits $1,295 ahead.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Longview heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. Switching saves about $662 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 12.1 years.
How Longview compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Longview's winter puts it at rank 2620 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 436 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the mildest third of cities covered, where utility rates carry more of the answer than climate does.
What to do with this number in Longview
About 83,668 people live in Longview, Texas, 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.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Where Longview's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Longview's 3.2 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Longview's 21°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.