Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Superior, CO
Here in Superior, 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. The heat pump would cost about $157 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Superior's numbers say wait.
The climate behind Superior's payback figure
4908 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Superior has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1015 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. -5.8°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -11.2°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.56 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Superior — 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 ATCT ROCKY MOUNTAIN METRO, the closest NOAA station, 3.1 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Superior
Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 4,855 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $946 a year. Superior's gas rate of 11.17 per Mcf, applied to the 51 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $788 a year, against 16.53¢ per kWh for electricity. Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is longer than the 15-year equipment life, leaving the 15-year total $5,857 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Gas isn't universal in Superior — many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Superior's answer improves. About $1,326 a year comes back this way, enough that the 6-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where Superior ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Superior comes in at 856 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2564 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step for 13,654 people in Superior
About 13,654 people live in Superior, Colorado, 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.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Superior's 2.56 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -5.8°F design temperature, Superior sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.