Comparisons
HVAC comparisons, each resolved to a number
Four decisions, costed from federal data, with the assumptions on the page and the answer stated.
Written by HYRE HVAC Research Desk Primary-source research and analysis
The short answer
Each comparison here takes one real HVAC decision and computes where it flips, using EIA 2024 energy prices, EIA’s RECS 2020 consumption data and DOE field studies. Every page states an answer and its assumptions. None asserts an equipment price: HyreHVAC sells no equipment, so we publish the threshold your own quote has to beat.
Which HVAC comparisons are there?
What rules are these comparisons written to?
Every comparison ends in a recommendation with the conditions attached. Where the evidence favors one option for a particular household, we say so — and both options are recommended somewhere, because both are right for someone.
We hold no quote or invoice data. Equipment and service prices are therefore never asserted: the pages compute the threshold and you supply the price.
A figure from EIA or DOE is a source fact. Arithmetic we performed on it is a HyreHVAC calculation. An interpretation is a HyreHVAC analysis. They are marked in the prose so you can discount ours without discarding theirs.
Seasonal COP, furnace efficiency, consumption basis, service life and the discount rate — or its deliberate absence — appear in the section that uses them, and the sensitivity is shown where it changes the answer.
The analysis is the HYRE HVAC Research Desk’s. No individual byline is attached to research on this site.
Questions
Do these HVAC comparisons include equipment prices?
What data are the comparisons computed from?
Does every comparison end in a recommendation?
Who writes the comparisons?
Written and audited by
HYRE HVAC Research Desk
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are a research desk, not a sales floor. We read the federal microdata file, the statute or the manufacturer data sheet ourselves, and we publish the figure with the document it came from and the date we retrieved it.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify.
The counts below are generated from the published pages themselves, last counted September 28, 2026, and they are what we have actually published rather than what we intend to.
- 13
- studies published
- 12
- federal sources read and cited
- 8
- studies published with their full dataset as CSV
- 51
- jurisdictions reproduced against EIA’s own tables
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Federal data comes from the agency that collects it, in the file that agency publishes. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we download the source and compute the figure ourselves.
- We validate against the agency before we publish. First, we use each federal microdata file to reproduce the agency’s own published tables. Our cooling research reproduces EIA’s state estimates and standard errors for all 51 jurisdictions. That check caught a variance formula that was off by a factor of four.
- Every estimate carries its uncertainty. These are survey figures, not counts. Standard errors are computed from the replicate weights the federal file supplies and printed beside the estimate. An estimate too imprecise to publish is reported as such rather than printed.
- Nothing is typed by hand. Prose, tables and charts all read from one dataset built by script, so a number in a sentence and the same number in the table below it cannot disagree.
- We publish the data, not just the conclusion. 8 of our 13 studies offer the full computed table as a CSV download on the page, so you can check the analysis or disagree with it. A study without a row-level dataset gets no download link and claims none in its structured data.
- We correct in public. Where we have published a figure wrongly we fix the figure, rewrite any analysis that rested on it rather than patching the number underneath it, and leave a dated correction note on the page.
- We do not install or sell HVAC equipment, and we take no payment for placement, ranking or a favorable mention. Nobody buys a position on this site.
Data as of EIA 2024 prices, RECS 2020 consumption. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold. Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
Run the numbers, then compare real quotes
Each comparison gives you the threshold. A quote for your own house tells you which side of it you are on.