North Logan, UT: the heat pump payback math
North Logan is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. 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). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $49 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's North Logan's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
North Logan's weather, in the numbers that matter
6351 heating degree days pile up here every year, so North Logan has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 765 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. 1.9°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -15°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.75 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in North Logan — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station LOGAN-CACHE AIRPORT, 2.5 miles from North Logan — the closest one on record.
North Logan's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,848 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $853 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 66 Mcf a year at 10.19 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $804 a year (electricity here runs 13.12¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $4,231 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in North Logan 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. The saving here runs about $1,387 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.8 years.
North Logan against the rest of the country
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, North Logan comes in at 110 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2859 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
What to do with this number in North Logan
North Logan, Utah is home to about 11,727 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 North Logan, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Where North Logan's figure comes from
Every constant behind this page — the 2.75 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. North Logan's 1.9°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.