Should Westwood switch to a heat pump?

Here in Westwood, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. 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). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $66 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Westwood's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Westwood's weather, in the numbers that matter

4363 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Westwood has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1248 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: 15.1°F here (record low 9°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 3.06 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Westwood 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. These numbers come from TETERBORO AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 9.7 miles out.

The month-to-month numbers for Westwood

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 3,610 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,088 a year. Westwood's gas rate of 14.21 per Mcf, applied to the 45 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $1,022 a year, against 23.28¢ 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 $4,490 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Westwood, compared

Gas isn't universal in Westwood — many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Westwood's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,860 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 4.3 years.

How Westwood compares nationally

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Westwood comes in at 1268 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2907 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.

Deciding what's next in Westwood, NJ

Westwood, New Jersey is home to about 11,434 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 Westwood, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

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 Westwood's 3.06 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Westwood's 15.1°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here — see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.