Heat Pump Payback in Riverton, WY
Will a heat pump pay off in Riverton, WY?
Here in Riverton, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $5,500 is what Riverton would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. The heat pump would cost about $166 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces, a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Riverton's numbers say wait.
Not the city you meant?
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Riverton. Look one up here.
Why Riverton's climate drives this number
Riverton has one of the harshest winters in the country, 7258 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 629 cooling degree days. -23.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -27°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.3 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, Riverton Regional Airport, 4.7 miles from Riverton.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 7,991 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,165 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 76 Mcf a year of gas at Riverton's $11.74 per-Mcf rate, about $999 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 13.66¢/kWh. With running costs higher every year, there is no payback at any purchase price; over 15 years, against a like-for-like replacement, a household here would end $7,990 behind.
The break-even point in Riverton
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Riverton if electricity fell to 11.5¢/kWh (from 13.66¢) or gas rose above $13.94 per Mcf (from $11.74). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Riverton, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in Riverton has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Riverton's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,457 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 6.9 years.
Riverton against the rest of the country
Among 3206 cities, Riverton's winter puts it at rank 36 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2993 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.
What to do with this number in Riverton
About 10,953 people live in Riverton, Wyoming, 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.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
More on how this number was built
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Riverton's 2.3 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a -23.1°F design temperature, Riverton sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.