Will a heat pump pay off in De Pere, WI?
Here in De Pere, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what De Pere would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Running costs here land $366 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's De Pere's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
De Pere's weather, in the numbers that matter
5968 heating degree days pile up here every year, so De Pere has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 605 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -2.9°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 2.63 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, De Pere sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station AUSTIN STRAUBEL INTERNATIONAL, 4.4 miles from De Pere — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for De Pere
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,746 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,182 a year. De Pere's gas rate of 10.74 per Mcf, applied to the 62 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $815 a year, against 18.87¢ per kWh for electricity. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs past the 15-year equipment life, for a 15-year net position $8,991 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in De Pere has gas service. 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 $1,818 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 4.4 years.
Where De Pere ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, De Pere comes in at 247 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 1575 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 De Pere
De Pere, Wisconsin is home to about 25,453 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 De Pere, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
Where De Pere's figure comes from
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind De Pere's 2.63 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a -2.9°F design temperature, De Pere sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.