Should Aberdeen switch to a heat pump?

Here in Aberdeen, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Aberdeen would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. The heat pump would cost about $321 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Aberdeen's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Aberdeen's payback figure

Degree days tell the story here: Aberdeen racks up 6970 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 714 cooling degree days on the cooling side. -16.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -18°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.31 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Aberdeen — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. These numbers come from ABERDEEN REGIONAL AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 3.1 miles out.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 7,640 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,167 a year. That compares with roughly 73 Mcf a year of gas at Aberdeen's 9.86 per-Mcf rate — about $847 a year — against a local electricity rate of 14.15¢/kWh. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs past the 15-year equipment life, for a 15-year net position $8,308 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Aberdeen, compared

Gas isn't universal in Aberdeen — many houses run on electric heat already. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. Switching saves about $1,461 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 5.5 years.

Aberdeen against the rest of the country

Among 3206 cities, Aberdeen's winter puts it at rank 48 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1433 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

Next step for 27,919 people in Aberdeen

About 27,919 people live in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and every number on this page is what a contractor would actually work from when quoting a system here — the point isn't to replace that quote, it's to tell you whether to bother asking for one. Here, there's no cost penalty to waiting until your current furnace or AC actually needs replacing.

Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.

More on how this number was built

Every constant behind this page — the 2.31 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. At a -16.1°F design temperature, Aberdeen sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.