Is a heat pump worth it in Ankeny?
In Ankeny, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $66 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Ankeny's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
How cold Ankeny actually gets
Ankeny has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5300 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 961 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -7.6°F, against a record low of -16.6°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.52 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Ankeny sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from ANKENY REGIONAL AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 3.3 miles out.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,326 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $818 a year. That compares with roughly 55 Mcf a year of gas at Ankeny's 10.61 per-Mcf rate — about $751 a year — against a local electricity rate of 13.31¢/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 $4,497 behind.
Electric resistance heat in Ankeny, compared
Gas isn't universal in Ankeny — many houses run on electric heat already. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. The saving here runs about $1,134 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 7.1 years.
How Ankeny compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Ankeny comes in at 483 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 494 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Deciding what's next in Ankeny, IA
Ankeny, Iowa is home to about 76,727 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 Ankeny, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
More on how this number was built
Every constant behind this page — the 2.52 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Ankeny's -7.6°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.