Is a heat pump worth it in Rochester?
Here in Rochester, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Rochester 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. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $97 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Rochester's numbers say wait.
Why Rochester's climate drives this number
Degree days tell the story here: Rochester racks up 5453 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 883 cooling degree days on the cooling side. 10°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 7°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.94 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Rochester sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from SKYHAVEN AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 3.1 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Rochester
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,697 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,460 a year on electricity. Rochester's gas rate of 18.61 per Mcf, applied to the 57 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $1,364 a year, against 26.80¢ per kWh for electricity. Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is longer than the 15-year equipment life, leaving the 15-year total $4,953 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Plenty of homes in Rochester 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. About $2,547 a year comes back this way, enough that the 3.1-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where Rochester ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Rochester comes in at 405 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 1222 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 Rochester
About 33,598 people live in Rochester, New Hampshire, 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.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Rochester's 2.94 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a 10°F design temperature, Rochester sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.