Vernal, UT: the heat pump payback math
In Vernal, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). The heat pump would cost about $24 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Vernal's numbers say wait.
Why Vernal's climate drives this number
Vernal has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6018 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 934 cooling degree days. 3.9°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -5.1°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.79 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Vernal — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station VERNAL AIRPORT, 1.4 miles from Vernal — the closest one on record.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,462 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $821 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 63 Mcf a year of gas at Vernal's 10.19 per-Mcf rate — about $797 a year — against a local electricity rate of 13.12¢/kWh. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $3,854 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Gas isn't universal in Vernal — many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Vernal's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,337 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 6 years.
Vernal against the rest of the country
Among 3206 cities, Vernal's winter puts it at rank 224 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 3049 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.
What to do with this number in Vernal
About 10,698 people live in Vernal, Utah, 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
Every constant behind this page — the 2.79 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Vernal's 3.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.