Will a heat pump pay off in Auburn Hills, MI?
Here in Auburn Hills, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. 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). Running costs here land $360 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Auburn Hills's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
How cold Auburn Hills actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: Auburn Hills racks up 5409 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 739 cooling degree days on the cooling side. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: 1°F here (record low -5.8°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.72 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Auburn Hills needs the cold-climate class of unit: past a 25°F design temperature a standard heat pump falls back on resistance backup often enough to eat the savings. Source: NOAA station OAKLAND CO. INTNL AIRPORT, 8.9 miles from Auburn Hills — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for Auburn Hills
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,035 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,174 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 56 Mcf a year at 10.92 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $814 a year (electricity here runs 20.72¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $8,904 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in Auburn Hills has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Auburn Hills's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,862 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 4.3 years.
Auburn Hills against the rest of the country
Among 3206 cities, Auburn Hills's winter puts it at rank 424 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1538 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 26,047 people in Auburn Hills
Auburn Hills, Michigan is home to about 26,047 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 Auburn Hills, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Where Auburn Hills's figure comes from
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Auburn Hills's 2.72 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a 1°F design temperature, Auburn Hills sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.