Is a heat pump worth it in Riverton?

Riverton technically pencils out, but only past the point the equipment would need replacing anyway. 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). Riverton's residents would see roughly $110 a year back in running costs, putting the payback around 31.9 years. That's a technicality, not a recommendation, for anyone actually living in Riverton.

How cold Riverton actually gets

Degree days tell the story here: Riverton racks up 4667 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1804 cooling degree days on the cooling side. 19°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 12.2°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.16 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Riverton needs the cold-climate class of unit: past a 25°F design temperature a standard heat pump falls back on resistance backup often enough to eat the savings. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, SALT LAKE CITY INTERNATIONAL, 18 miles from Riverton.

The month-to-month numbers for Riverton

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 3,740 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $692 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 49 Mcf a year at 10.19 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $802 a year (electricity here runs 13.12¢/kWh). Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is roughly 123.2 years, leaving the 15-year total $1,856 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Riverton, compared

Not every home in Riverton has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Riverton's answer improves. About $1,165 a year comes back this way, enough that the 6.9-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.

Where Riverton ranks in this dataset

Riverton lands at position 1029 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 875 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). 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 Riverton

Riverton, Utah is home to about 46,680 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 Riverton, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Riverton's 3.16 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Riverton's 19°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.