Is a heat pump worth it in Redmond?
Redmond sits right on the fence — how long you'll own the house decides this one. $3,500 is what Redmond 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 $241 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 14.5 years. It's a genuine toss-up here — Redmond's numbers don't point clearly either way.
How cold Redmond actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: Redmond racks up 5741 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 635 cooling degree days on the cooling side. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is 1.9°F, against a record low of -2.9°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.75 for the recommended cold-climate unit. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Redmond — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. These numbers come from ROBERTS FIELD AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 2.2 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Redmond
Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 5,286 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $882 a year. Redmond's gas rate of 16.71 per Mcf, applied to the 60 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $1,124 a year, against 15.14¢ per kWh for electricity. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 55.9 years; over 15 years the net position sits $121 ahead.
Electric resistance heat in Redmond, compared
Gas isn't universal in Redmond — 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 $1,443 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 5.5 years.
How Redmond compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Redmond's winter puts it at rank 300 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1106 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Deciding what's next in Redmond, OR
Redmond, Oregon is home to about 37,626 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 Redmond, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Where Redmond's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Redmond's 2.75 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a 1.9°F design temperature, Redmond sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.