Is a heat pump worth it in Cedar Falls?

Here in Cedar Falls, 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). The heat pump would cost about $110 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. That's Cedar Falls's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

How cold Cedar Falls actually gets

Degree days tell the story here: Cedar Falls racks up 5493 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 982 cooling degree days on the cooling side. -13°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -15°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.39 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Cedar Falls sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from WATERLOO MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 3.6 miles out.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,820 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $886 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 57 Mcf a year at 10.61 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $776 a year (electricity here runs 13.31¢/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 $5,145 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Plenty of homes in Cedar Falls 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 $1,135 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 7.1 years.

Cedar Falls against the rest of the country

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Cedar Falls comes in at 383 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 989 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 Cedar Falls

Cedar Falls, Iowa is home to about 41,417 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 Cedar Falls, 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

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Cedar Falls's 2.39 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -13°F design temperature, Cedar Falls sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.