Heat Pump Payback in Burlington, IA
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Burlington, IA
Burlington is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. $5,500 is what Burlington would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. Running costs here land $63 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Burlington's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
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How cold Burlington actually gets
4871 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Burlington has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1031 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -9°F here (coldest 2024 reading -18°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.48 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Burlington, below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, SE Iowa Regional Airport, 1.7 miles from Burlington.
The yearly running costs in Burlington
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,973 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $779 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 51 Mcf a year of gas at Burlington's $10.61 per-Mcf rate, about $716 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 13.31¢/kWh. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $6,443 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
What would change Burlington's answer
For the verdict in Burlington to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 11.9¢/kWh from 13.31¢, or gas climb past $11.85 per Mcf from $10.61. 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 Burlington; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Burlington heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $1,041 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 9.6 years.
Where Burlington ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Burlington comes in at 881 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 1675 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Deciding what's next in Burlington, IA
Burlington, Iowa is home to about 23,637 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 Burlington, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Burlington's 2.48 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Burlington's -9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.