How much does a heat pump reduce energy use and carbon vs gas furnace?

[Stephen19]

I’m trying to figure out if my family’s switch to a heat pump last winter actually made the difference I hoped for, or if our old gas furnace was just that inefficient. Our electricity bill went up, but I can’t tell if that’s just from the increased demand on the grid during the cold snap or if our overall carbon footprint is genuinely lower now.

[SofiaM]

We switched last winter and the place felt warmer, which was nice, but our electricity bill did go up. We kept the old gas bill to compare, and it didn’t look like a clean win yet, just a different kind of cost.

[EleanorGW]

Could the real bottleneck be insulation or busted ducts rather than the heat pump itself?

[EdwardGT]

From my rough checks, I looked at weather-normalized usage and saw a small net difference, but it’s easy to misread because of cold snaps. The heat pump runs more hours, and you feel the difference in comfort even when the bill’s higher.

[Noah_H]

I started a spreadsheet to track heat pump vs furnace cost, but then life happened and I never finished. Still, the takeaway was that the same house on colder nights and with changing electricity rates makes it hard to tell if the switch lowered our carbon footprint.