Should Los Gatos switch to a heat pump?
Los Gatos sits right on the fence — how long you'll own the house decides this one. $1,000 is what Los Gatos 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 $92 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 10.8 years. Whether that's worth it in Los Gatos depends on how many years you expect to own the place.
Why Los Gatos's climate drives this number
1672 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Los Gatos has a mild winter by US standards; the cooling side runs to 922 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. 36°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 35.1°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.27 on the standard unit fit for this climate. A standard ducted system is enough here; Los Gatos's design temperature doesn't justify the cold-climate premium. Source: NOAA station N Y. MINETA SN JO INTL APT, 9.1 miles from Los Gatos — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for Los Gatos
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 1,295 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $683 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 17 Mcf a year of gas at Los Gatos's 22.01 per-Mcf rate — about $776 a year — against a local electricity rate of 32.83¢/kWh. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 119 years; over 15 years the net position sits $386 ahead.
Electric resistance heat in Los Gatos, compared
Plenty of homes in Los Gatos 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 $1,099 a year here — a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils — so the extra $5,500 spent up front comes back in about 5 years.
Where Los Gatos ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Los Gatos comes in at 2604 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 1250 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the mildest third of cities covered, where utility rates carry more of the answer than climate does.
Next step for 32,952 people in Los Gatos
About 32,952 people live in Los Gatos, California, 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.
More on how this number was built
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Los Gatos's 3.27 seasonal COP and payback figure. Not every home in Los Gatos has gas; the guide comparing a heat pump against electric baseboard covers that case separately.