Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Bellevue, WI

In Bellevue, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. Running costs here land $366 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Bellevue's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

How cold Bellevue actually gets

5968 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Bellevue has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 605 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 -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, Bellevue sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station AUSTIN STRAUBEL INTERNATIONAL, 9 miles from Bellevue — the closest one on record.

The month-to-month numbers for Bellevue

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. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 62 Mcf a year at 10.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $815 a year (electricity here runs 18.87¢/kWh). 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.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Plenty of homes in Bellevue heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. 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 Bellevue ranks in this dataset

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Bellevue comes in at 250 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2220 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 Bellevue

Bellevue, Wisconsin is home to about 16,749 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 Bellevue, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.

Where Bellevue's figure comes from

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Bellevue's 2.63 seasonal COP and payback figure. Bellevue's -2.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.