Heat Pump Payback in Moses Lake, WA
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Moses Lake, WA
Moses Lake technically pencils out, but only past the point the equipment would need replacing anyway. $5,500 is what Moses Lake would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. Lower bills claw that back: about $325 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 16.9 years. Moses Lake's own numbers say this pencils out only in theory, not in practice.
Compare against another city
Landed on Moses Lake by mistake, or want to compare it against somewhere else? Search the other 3206 cities below.
Why Moses Lake's climate drives this number
Moses Lake has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment, 5289 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 984 cooling degree days. 0°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -5.1°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.7 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Moses Lake sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station Grant County International Airport, 5.9 miles from Moses Lake, the closest one on record.
Moses Lake's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,960 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $828 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 55 Mcf a year of gas at Moses Lake's $17.62 per-Mcf rate, about $1,153 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 14.27¢/kWh. Priced as a standalone purchase, with a working furnace ripped out early, payback would take longer than the 15-year equipment life. Measured against the like-for-like replacement instead, a household here ends 15 years $625 behind.
What would change Moses Lake's answer
This result holds unless electricity climbs above 21.5¢/kWh (it is 14.27¢ now) or gas drops below $11.72 per Mcf (now $17.62); past either point, gas becomes the cheaper fuel in Moses Lake. When quotes arrive, compare the heat pump price with a like-for-like furnace and AC replacement: at $325 a year saved, a difference under $2,275 pays back within 7 years here, and under $3,250 within 10.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Gas isn't universal in Moses Lake, many houses run on electric heat already. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. Switching saves about $1,266 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 7.9 years.
Where Moses Lake ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Moses Lake comes in at 491 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 1480 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Deciding what's next in Moses Lake, WA
About 26,969 people live in Moses Lake, Washington, 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.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Where Moses Lake's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Moses Lake's 2.7 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Moses Lake's 0°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here, see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.