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. $3,500 is what South Burlington 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. 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.
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 record low of -4°F on file. 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 its running cost near $1,367 a year, against 23.90¢ per kWh for electricity. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $4,982 behind.
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 3.3-year payback clears the $8,000 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.