Heat Pump Payback in South Burlington, VT
South Burlington, VT: the heat pump payback math
Here in South Burlington, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $5,500 is what South Burlington would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. Running costs here land $99 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's South Burlington's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Not the city you meant?
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just South Burlington. Look one up here.
How cold South Burlington actually gets
5954 heating degree days pile up here every year, so South Burlington has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 810 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. 3°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -4°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.77 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. South Burlington 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. Source: NOAA station Burlington International Airp, 2.7 miles from South Burlington, the closest one on record.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 5,443 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,466 a year. South Burlington's gas rate of $18.00 per Mcf, applied to the 62 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $1,367 a year, against 23.90¢ per kWh for electricity. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $6,982 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
How sensitive South Burlington's result is to prices
For the verdict in South Burlington to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 22.0¢/kWh from 23.90¢, or gas climb past $19.59 per Mcf from $18.00. A utility offering a lower heat pump rate can change this. Until then, no quote price makes a heat pump pay back against gas in South Burlington; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Gas isn't universal in South Burlington, many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and South Burlington's answer improves. About $2,388 a year comes back this way, enough that the 4.2-year payback clears the $10,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
South Burlington against the rest of the country
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, South Burlington comes in at 256 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 1802 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 South Burlington
South Burlington, Vermont is home to about 21,713 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 South Burlington, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
Reading further on this page's numbers
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind South Burlington's 2.77 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a 3°F design temperature, South Burlington sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.