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Heat pump vs furnace in Moffat County, Colorado

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Which costs less to run in Moffat County?

A gray outdoor condenser unit with a top-mounted fan sits on a concrete pad against dark blue horizontal lap siding at night, with a wall-mounted disconnect box and refrigerant lines to its right.

Heat pump

To heat your home here$1.99per 100,000 Btu

A beige furnace with louvered front panels stands on a concrete basement floor against a blue-painted block wall, with a galvanized metal flue pipe rising from its top and a bare bulb lit overhead.

Furnace

To heat your home here$1.26per 100,000 Btu

At Colorado's gas and electricity prices, a gas furnace makes the same heat as a heat pump for at least 36% less.

Btu stands for British thermal unit, the standard measure of heat energy.

Where does a heat pump shine?

  • Steady, even comfort

    A heat pump runs long and low instead of blasting on and off. Rooms hold an even temperature all day.

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  • No gas line, nothing burning in the house

    A heat pump runs on electricity alone. Nothing burns inside the house.

    Kitchen interior with a navy island topped by a wood counter and black induction hob holding a pale blue kettle, cream wall cabinets with a built-in black double oven, glass pendant lights, a vase of blue hydrangeas, and glass doors showing a fenced garden.

  • Heats and cools in one system

    A heat pump runs the same way all year. It pulls heat into the house in winter and pushes it out in summer.

    A living room with a cream sofa holding navy and light blue pillows and a blue throw, a wood-and-metal coffee table with books, a pitcher and potted plant, a jute rug, a navy built-in bookshelf at left, and a large window showing green trees and shrubs.

Where does a furnace shine?

  • Strong, steady heat in hard cold

    Winter nights here average 13°F, and a furnace puts out the same hot air whether it's that cold or colder. You won't notice it working harder, it just keeps the house warm.

    A dark-sided two-story house with white trim and a covered front porch, its windows lit at dusk, with deep snow banked along a shoveled walkway to the steps and bare trees at left.

  • Runs on the gas most homes here already use

    Most homes in Moffat County already have a gas line run to them, since 61.9% of occupied homes here heat with utility gas. If yours is one of them, a gas furnace just hooks into what's already there.

    A sidewalk beside a pale blue clapboard house with concrete front steps, a black metal handrail, a gas meter, bare shrubs, and melting snow along the strip, with a distant person walking on the sidewalk.

  • Pairs with any central AC

    Most central air systems are built around a furnace. The two share the blower, the ducts and the thermostat.

    A metal floor vent set into a hardwood floor beside a white sheer curtain, white trim and blue wall, with a potted plant in a woven basket at right in sunlight.

What 13 below zero does to a heat pump

Winter nights here average 13°F, and about 210 of them drop to freezing or below. A standard heat pump starts losing capacity below 40°F and often needs backup heat below about 35°F. That means almost every cold night here, the machine is working below both marks, not just a few bad nights in January.

This is not the same as saying a heat pump can't heat your house. ENERGY STAR's Cold Climate heat pumps are built and tested to still make 1.75 units of heat for every unit of electricity at 5°F, and to hold onto most of their rated capacity at that temperature. Field tests of these cold-climate models found that backup heat covered only a small share of the load between 0°F and 35°F, and running on backup alone was rare even down near 0°F. So the difference between a standard heat pump and a cold-climate one matters more here than in most places, because you'll spend most of the heating season on the wrong side of 35°F.

About 30 nights a year reach 0°F or below. That's under a quarter of the freezing nights, but it's the stretch where a standard heat pump leans hardest on backup heat, usually electric resistance, which costs more to run than the heat pump itself. A furnace has no such cliff. It makes the same heat at 13°F that it makes at 40°F.

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What it costs to run, and what's already in the walls

At Colorado's average fuel prices, a gas furnace makes the same heat for at least 36% less than a heat pump, $1.26 against $1.99 per 100,000 Btu. That gap holds for the full 9 months heat runs here, not just the cold snaps. A heat pump built only to the federal minimum doesn't close it, and the colder nights, where backup heat adds to the bill, only widen it.

Three in five homes in Moffat County already heat with utility gas, and about one in ten more run on propane. If gas line and venting are already in place, a furnace uses what's already there. A heat pump replaces that with a system built around electricity instead, which a little under one in five homes here currently use to heat.

Cooling here runs one month, July. A heat pump handles both heating and cooling in one system, so it replaces a furnace and a separate air conditioner with one piece of equipment. A furnace only heats. It has nothing to do the other three months of the year and still needs an air conditioner alongside it to cover July.

For most houses here, the cold decides it. Nine months of heat a year, almost all of it below where a standard heat pump keeps its rated output, and gas already cheaper to run and already in place in most homes, point to a furnace for heat. Where a heat pump still makes sense is a house that wants one system for both heating and cooling and is willing to pay the higher running cost, and even then it should be a cold-climate model, not the federal minimum this comparison prices out.

Sources: NOAA nClimDiv · NOAA 1991–2020 seasonal normals · EIA SEDS 2024 · 10 CFR 430.32 · PNNL Building America guide · PNNL-37127 field study · ENERGY STAR product criteria · Census ACS 2020–2024

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Common questions about heat pumps and furnaces

  • Can a heat pump heat a house through a Colorado winter?

    A standard heat pump struggles once it gets cold enough, and Moffat County gets there most nights. The overnight low averages 13°F across December, January and February, well past the point where a standard heat pump's output drops below its rating. A cold-climate model built to the ENERGY STAR spec holds onto more of its heat at 5°F, but that's a different machine than the federal-minimum unit priced in the running-cost band above.

  • Do I need backup heat with a heat pump here?

    Most likely, yes. Backup heat on a standard heat pump often kicks in below about 35°F, and about 210 nights a year here drop to freezing or colder, most of the nine months the heat runs. Thirty of those nights reach 0°F or below, where backup heat does more of the work.

  • Can I keep my furnace and add a heat pump?

    Yes, and here that often means the furnace handles the cold nights. A heat pump's output falls short of its rating below 40°F, and it often needs backup heat below about 35°F. Your winter low here averages 13°F, so the furnace would be doing real work, not just sitting as a backup that rarely runs.

  • Is a heat pump cheaper to run than a furnace in Moffat County?

    No. A gas furnace here runs $1.26 per 100,000 Btu of heat against $1.99 for a heat pump, both at Colorado's average fuel prices and federal minimum efficiency. That gap comes from the price of the fuel itself: natural gas cost Colorado homes $10.09 per million Btu in 2024, electricity $43.72.

A man in a light blue polo shirt and dark jeans kneels in a basement, holding a panel on a gray furnace connected to sheet-metal ductwork, with an open tool bag on the floor nearby.

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