Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Brown Deer, WI

Here in Brown Deer, 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 $356 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Brown Deer's numbers say wait.

Why Brown Deer's climate drives this number

Brown Deer has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5878 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 552 cooling degree days. -2.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -9.4°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.65 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Brown Deer 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 LAWRENCE J TIMMERMAN AIRPORT, 5.3 miles from Brown Deer — the closest one on record.

Brown Deer's running-cost comparison, in dollars

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,617 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,149 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 61 Mcf a year at 10.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $792 a year (electricity here runs 18.87¢/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 $8,843 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Brown Deer, compared

Not every home in Brown Deer has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Brown Deer's answer improves. About $1,795 a year comes back this way, enough that the 4.5-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.

How Brown Deer compares nationally

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Brown Deer comes in at 272 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2727 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 Brown Deer

About 12,527 people live in Brown Deer, Wisconsin, and every number on this page is what a contractor would actually work from when quoting a system here — the point isn't to replace that quote, it's to tell you whether to bother asking for one. Here, there's no cost penalty to waiting until your current furnace or AC actually needs replacing.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

More on how this number was built

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Brown Deer's 2.65 seasonal COP and payback figure. Brown Deer's -2.2°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here — see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.