Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Mountain Home, AR
Mountain Home sits right on the fence — how long you'll own the house decides this one. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). Mountain Home's residents would see roughly $336 a year back in running costs, putting the payback around 10.4 years. It's a genuine toss-up here — Mountain Home's numbers don't point clearly either way.
Mountain Home's weather, in the numbers that matter
Degree days tell the story here: Mountain Home racks up 3169 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1565 cooling degree days on the cooling side. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: 1°F here (record low -2°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.72 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Mountain Home — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, OZARK REGIONAL AIRPORT, 5.3 miles from Mountain Home.
Mountain Home's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 2,950 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $569 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 33 Mcf a year at 19.25 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $905 a year (electricity here runs 13.28¢/kWh). Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is roughly 40.2 years, leaving the 15-year total $1,535 ahead.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Mountain Home has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Mountain Home's answer improves. The saving here runs about $766 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 10.4 years.
Where Mountain Home ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Mountain Home comes in at 1858 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2606 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
What to do with this number in Mountain Home
Mountain Home, Arkansas is home to about 13,348 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 Mountain Home, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Mountain Home's 2.72 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Mountain Home's 1°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.