Heat Pump Payback in Baraboo, WI
Will a heat pump pay off in Baraboo, WI?
Here in Baraboo, 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 $5,500 more up front here. Running costs here land $394 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Baraboo's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Not the city you meant?
Baraboo is one of 3206 cities covered here, each run through the same model. Search another below.
Baraboo's weather, in the numbers that matter
5845 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Baraboo has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 668 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is -6.9°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -10.5°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.53 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Baraboo sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, Baraboo Wisconsin Dells Airpo, 4.1 miles from Baraboo.
The yearly running costs in Baraboo
Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 5,850 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,211 a year. That compares with roughly 61 Mcf a year of gas at Baraboo's $10.74 per-Mcf rate, about $817 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 18.87¢/kWh. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $11,413 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
The break-even point in Baraboo
For the verdict in Baraboo to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 11.8¢/kWh from 18.87¢, or gas climb past $17.22 per Mcf from $10.74. A utility offering a lower heat pump rate can change this. Until then, no quote price makes a heat pump pay back against gas in Baraboo; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
Electric resistance heat in Baraboo, compared
Plenty of homes in Baraboo heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Baraboo's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,745 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.7 years.
Where Baraboo ranks in this dataset
Baraboo lands at position 275 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 2641 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step if you live in Baraboo
Baraboo, Wisconsin is home to about 13,096 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 Baraboo, 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
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Baraboo's 2.53 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Baraboo's -6.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.