Is a heat pump worth it in San Luis?
San Luis is a clear case: a heat pump beats what you have by a wide margin. $1,000 is what San Luis 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. That premium is recovered through $377 of lower running costs every year, landing the payback clock at roughly 2.7 years. Nothing about that conclusion is generic — it's built entirely from San Luis's own numbers.
Why San Luis's climate drives this number
San Luis barely has a winter to speak of — 688 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers are severe enough that cooling can dominate the annual bill, at 4728 cooling degree days. 37°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 36°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.3 on the standard unit fit for this climate. A standard ducted system is enough here; San Luis's design temperature doesn't justify the cold-climate premium. Source: NOAA station YUMA MCAS, 12.9 miles from San Luis — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for San Luis
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 528 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $709 a year. That compares with roughly 7 Mcf a year of gas at San Luis's 18.58 per-Mcf rate — about $1,086 a year — against a local electricity rate of 15.55¢/kWh. Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is roughly 29.2 years, leaving the 15-year total $4,655 ahead.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Plenty of homes in San Luis heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. Switching saves about $515 a year here — a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils — so the extra $5,500 spent up front comes back in about 10.7 years.
Where San Luis ranks in this dataset
San Luis lands at position 2992 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1030 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the mildest third of cities covered, where utility rates carry more of the answer than climate does.
Deciding what's next in San Luis, AZ
About 40,064 people live in San Luis, Arizona, 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, it's worth getting quotes before your current system fails, not after.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
More on how this number was built
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind San Luis's 3.3 seasonal COP and payback figure. See what San Luis's figure looks like without the $2,000 federal credit in the guide to how that credit moves the payback window.