Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Utica, NY
Here in Utica, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Utica 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. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $522 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Utica's numbers say wait.
The climate behind Utica's payback figure
Utica has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6160 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 544 cooling degree days. -2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -2.9°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.65 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Utica sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, GRIFFIS AIRFIELD, 13.4 miles from Utica.
The month-to-month numbers for Utica
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,886 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,855 a year on electricity. Utica's gas rate of 17.58 per Mcf, applied to the 64 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $1,334 a year, against 29.22¢ 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 $11,324 behind.
Electric resistance heat in Utica, compared
Gas isn't universal in Utica — many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Utica's answer improves. Switching saves about $2,908 a year here — a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils — so the extra $8,000 spent up front comes back in about 2.8 years.
Where Utica ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Utica comes in at 167 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 619 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 Utica
About 63,660 people live in Utica, New York, 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.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Utica's 2.65 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -2°F design temperature, Utica sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.