Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Crawfordsville, IN
In Crawfordsville, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. 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). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $167 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Crawfordsville's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Crawfordsville's weather, in the numbers that matter
Degree days tell the story here: Crawfordsville racks up 4684 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1024 cooling degree days on the cooling side. -8°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -9°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.51 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Crawfordsville sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, PURDUE UNIVERSITY AIRPORT, 25.7 miles from Crawfordsville.
The month-to-month numbers for Crawfordsville
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,725 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $953 a year. That compares with roughly 49 Mcf a year of gas at Crawfordsville's 11.49 per-Mcf rate — about $787 a year — against a local electricity rate of 17.03¢/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 $6,003 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Crawfordsville heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Crawfordsville's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,292 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 6.2 years.
How Crawfordsville compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Crawfordsville's winter puts it at rank 1017 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2233 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. 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 Crawfordsville
Crawfordsville, Indiana is home to about 16,594 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 Crawfordsville, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
More on how this number was built
Every constant behind this page — the 2.51 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Crawfordsville's -8°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.