Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Rock Springs, WY

Here in Rock Springs, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $25 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Rock Springs's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Rock Springs's weather, in the numbers that matter

7510 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Rock Springs has one of the harshest winters in the country; the cooling side runs to 428 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -0.9°F, against a record low of -14.1°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.68 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Rock Springs sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from RCK SRINGS-SWETWTER CO APT, the closest NOAA station, 8.7 miles out.

The month-to-month numbers for Rock Springs

Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 7,096 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,019 a year. That compares with roughly 78 Mcf a year of gas at Rock Springs's 11.74 per-Mcf rate — about $994 a year — against a local electricity rate of 13.66¢/kWh. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs past the 15-year equipment life, for a 15-year net position $3,877 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Not every home in Rock Springs has gas service. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. Switching saves about $1,654 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 4.8 years.

Rock Springs against the rest of the country

Rock Springs lands at position 28 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1721 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.

Deciding what's next in Rock Springs, WY

Rock Springs, Wyoming is home to about 22,967 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 Rock Springs, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.

Reading further on this page's numbers

Every constant behind this page — the 2.68 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Rock Springs's -0.9°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.