Heat Pump Payback in Crawfordsville, IN
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 $5,500 more up front here. 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.
Compare against another city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Crawfordsville. Look one up here.
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 low of -9°F in the 2024 station record. 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 yearly running costs in 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 with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 17.03¢/kWh. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $8,003 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
What would change Crawfordsville's answer
For the verdict in Crawfordsville to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 13.1¢/kWh from 17.03¢, or gas climb past $14.91 per Mcf from $11.49. 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 Crawfordsville; 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 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 $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 7.7 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.