Is a heat pump worth it in Scranton?
Scranton is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. 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 $48 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Scranton's numbers say wait.
The climate behind Scranton's payback figure
Degree days tell the story here: Scranton racks up 5021 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 857 cooling degree days on the cooling side. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is 8.1°F, against a record low of -2°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.89 for the recommended cold-climate unit. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Scranton — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. These numbers come from WILKES-BARRE/SCRANTON INTL AI, the closest NOAA station, 5.8 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Scranton
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,399 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,064 a year. Scranton's gas rate of 15.04 per Mcf, applied to the 52 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $1,017 a year, against 20.75¢ per kWh for electricity. 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 $4,213 behind.
Electric resistance heat in Scranton, compared
Gas isn't universal in Scranton — many houses run on electric heat already. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. The saving here runs about $1,804 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 4.4 years.
How Scranton compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Scranton's winter puts it at rank 667 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 502 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.
Deciding what's next in Scranton, PA
About 75,905 people live in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 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
Every constant behind this page — the 2.89 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Scranton's 8.1°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.