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Heat pump vs furnace in Yuma County, Colorado

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Which costs less to run in Yuma County?

An outdoor air conditioning condenser unit with a top-mounted fan grille sits on a concrete pad surrounded by gravel, beside a dark horizontal-lap sided wall with a small electrical disconnect box.

Heat pump

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

A beige residential furnace with louvered panels stands on a concrete basement floor against a dark blue painted block wall, with a galvanized metal flue pipe rising from its top and copper and steel pipes along the wall.

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.

    A light-colored dog sleeps on a woven rug in a dimly lit living room with a navy armchair holding an open book and a knit blanket, a lit floor lamp, built-in shelves, and a window showing snow-covered trees at dusk.

  • Heats and cools in one system

    One machine handles the heat in winter and the cooling in summer. There's no second system to buy or keep up.

    A living room with navy blue walls and built-in shelving, a beige sectional sofa with blue and gray pillows and a knit throw, a wooden coffee table with a woven tray and glass vase of greenery, a leather ottoman, and a large window looking onto green shrubs and hydrangeas.

  • No gas line, nothing burning in the house

    It moves heat instead of making it from fire. That means no combustion, no flue and no gas bill for heat.

    A stainless steel stovetop kettle sits on a black induction cooktop set into a white marble counter, with navy cabinets below, a white subway tile backsplash, a crock of wooden utensils, and blue hydrangeas in a glass vase near a window.

Where does a furnace shine?

  • Strong, steady heat in hard cold

    Winter nights here average 18°F, and a furnace puts out hot air from the start no matter how cold it gets outside. It won't struggle to keep up as the temperature drops.

    A person in a dark coat carrying a bag walks up a shoveled snow path toward a blue wooden house with snow-covered roof and lit windows at dusk.

  • Runs on the gas most homes here already use

    Most homes in Yuma County already run on gas, so a gas furnace fits right into the setup your house probably has. No need to add new fuel service or rework what's already feeding your home.

    A row of brick houses with dark blue painted porch columns and stone front steps, with a gas meter and piping beside the stairs and snow covering the ground along the sidewalk.

  • Fast, strong heat on demand

    Turn the heat up and the furnace answers right away. There's no long wait for the house to catch up.

    Entryway with a dark navy glass-paned door showing snow outside, winter boots on a tiled floor beside a blue runner rug, a sheer curtain at a window, a wooden bench with a blue throw and steaming mug, and coats hanging on wall hooks.

What the cold here does to a heat pump

Winter is the long season here, eight months of it, October through May, and the overnight low over those months averages 18 degrees. That number matters because a standard heat pump starts losing ground well above it. Below 40°F its heat output drops under its rating. Below about 35°F it often needs backup heat to make up the difference. Here, every single night that falls to freezing or below, about 160 of them a year, is colder than both of those marks.

So for more than half the nights of the year, a standard heat pump is working below where it performs best, and leaning on backup heat to do it. That backup is usually electric resistance heat, the most expensive way to warm a house. The running cost quoted for a heat pump, $1.99 per 100,000 Btu, does not include it. On the coldest nights the real number runs higher than that.

There is a version built for this. ENERGY STAR's Cold Climate heat pumps are tested to hold at least 1.75 units of heat per unit of electricity at 5°F, and to keep 70 percent of their rated capacity at that temperature, verified by outside testing. Field tests of prototype cold climate units found backup heat carried only a small share of the load between 0°F and 35°F, and running on backup alone was rare even at 0°F. Yuma County only reaches 0°F about 7 nights a year. A cold climate model is built for nights like that. A standard one is not.

A snow shovel leans beside a dark blue storm door with a frost-covered glass panel on a house with beige siding, light blue shutters, a lantern light and mailbox, above snow-covered concrete steps flanked by black metal railings.

What it costs to run, and what's already at the house

A gas furnace costs less to run here regardless of which heat pump you compare it to. Colorado's fuel prices put a furnace at $1.26 per 100,000 Btu of heat against $1.99 for a standard heat pump, a gap of at least 36 percent, and that heat pump figure has no backup heat added in. A furnace also only does one job. It has nothing to do the other four months of the year, while a heat pump heats all winter and cools all summer on one system, no second unit for the roughly three months, June through August, when the afternoon hits 90°F or better on about 55 days.

Gas is also what most houses here already run on. Utility gas heats 57.2 percent of homes in the county and propane heats another 22.8 percent, so close to four in five homes already have a gas line in place. Electricity heats 17.4 percent. If your house is one of the gas-heated majority, a furnace keeps you on the fuel line already running to the house. A heat pump means wiring for electric heat at a scale most of these houses were never set up to carry, since the house itself gives no sign either way of what that would take.

If you want one system that heats and cools and you are willing to pay more to run it, look for the Cold Climate designation specifically, not a standard heat pump, given how far below 35°F and 40°F this county's winters sit. If keeping the running cost down matters most, or the house is already on gas, a furnace is the plainer choice here.

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

Snow-covered concrete steps and black metal railings lead to a white storm door on a dark blue clapboard house, with a snow shovel leaning at right and a snow-laden shrub at left.

Common questions about heat pumps and furnaces

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

    It can, but not at full strength on the coldest nights. A standard heat pump puts out less than its rated capacity once it's below 40°F outside, and only a fraction of that rating in the teens, so on the roughly 7 nights a year here that reach 0°F it needs backup heat to keep the house warm. Cold-climate models are built to hold more of their capacity in that kind of cold, but a standard heat pump will struggle through a Yuma County winter on its own.

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

    Most likely, yes. A standard heat pump's efficiency drops below about 35°F and its output falls short of its rating below 40°F, and here the overnight low averages 18°F across December, January and February. About 160 nights a year drop to freezing or below, so there's a lot of winter where a heat pump built to the federal minimum needs something else to lean on.

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

    Yes, and here that often makes sense. The furnace keeps doing the hard work on the coldest nights, the kind that hit 18°F on an average winter night, while the heat pump covers the milder stretches. A heat pump built to the federal minimum starts falling short of its rated heat below 40°F, so pairing it with the furnace already at your house gives you a backup for the nights it can't keep up.

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

    No, a gas furnace costs less to run here. Heating this house with a heat pump runs $1.99 per 100,000 Btu against $1.26 for a gas furnace, using Colorado's average fuel prices. That gap holds for a heat pump built to the federal minimum, and it doesn't include any extra cost for the backup heat it would likely need on the area's coldest nights.

A person in a dark blue shirt and black gloves uses a wrench on brass service valves and copper lines at the side of an outdoor air conditioning condenser unit, with a tool bag and a cordless drill on the mulch in the foreground.

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