Is a heat pump worth it in Beaver Dam?

Here in Beaver Dam, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Beaver Dam 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. Running costs here land $468 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Beaver Dam's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Beaver Dam's weather, in the numbers that matter

6257 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Beaver Dam has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 454 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -9°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -11.6°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.48 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Beaver Dam 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. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, DODGE COUNTY AIRPORT, 7.1 miles from Beaver Dam.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 6,389 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,279 a year on electricity. Beaver Dam's gas rate of 10.74 per Mcf, applied to the 65 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $811 a year, against 18.87¢ per kWh for electricity. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $10,515 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Gas isn't universal in Beaver Dam — 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 $1,822 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.

Beaver Dam against the rest of the country

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Beaver Dam comes in at 130 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2256 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

What to do with this number in Beaver Dam

Beaver Dam, Wisconsin is home to about 16,443 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 Beaver Dam, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.

Reading further on this page's numbers

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Beaver Dam's 2.48 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a -9°F design temperature, Beaver Dam sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.