Should Crown Point switch to a heat pump?

Here in Crown Point, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. The heat pump would cost about $174 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Crown Point's numbers say wait.

Why Crown Point's climate drives this number

Degree days tell the story here: Crown Point racks up 4971 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 864 cooling degree days on the cooling side. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -5.3°F, against a record low of -10.7°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.57 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Crown Point sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from LANSING MUNICIPAL AP, the closest NOAA station, 13.2 miles out.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,898 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $960 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 52 Mcf a year at 11.49 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $786 a year (electricity here runs 17.03¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $6,110 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Not every home in Crown Point has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Crown Point's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,375 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 5.8 years.

Crown Point against the rest of the country

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Crown Point comes in at 755 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 1171 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 Crown Point

About 35,097 people live in Crown Point, Indiana, 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.

Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.

Reading further on this page's numbers

Every constant behind this page — the 2.57 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Crown Point's -5.3°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.