Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Allouez, WI

Here in Allouez, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Allouez 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. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $366 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Allouez's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Allouez's weather, in the numbers that matter

Allouez has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5968 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 605 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -2.9°F, against a record low of -9°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.63 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Allouez sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from AUSTIN STRAUBEL INTERNATIONAL, the closest NOAA station, 5.5 miles out.

Allouez's running-cost comparison, in dollars

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,746 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,182 a year on electricity. Allouez's gas rate of 10.74 per Mcf, applied to the 62 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $815 a year, against 18.87¢ per kWh for electricity. Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is longer than the 15-year equipment life, leaving the 15-year total $8,991 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Plenty of homes in Allouez heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. Switching saves about $1,818 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 4.4 years.

Where Allouez ranks in this dataset

Among 3206 cities, Allouez's winter puts it at rank 251 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2522 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.

Deciding what's next in Allouez, WI

Allouez, Wisconsin is home to about 13,923 people, and the figures above are the same ones a local HVAC contractor uses to size and quote a system — this site doesn't guess where a real quote would land, it just tells you whether it's worth asking for one. In Allouez, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.

More on how this number was built

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Allouez's 2.63 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a -2.9°F design temperature, Allouez sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.