Heat Pump Payback in Dearborn Heights, MI
Is a heat pump worth it in Dearborn Heights?
Dearborn Heights is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. 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 $300 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Dearborn Heights'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 Dearborn Heights. Look one up here.
How cold Dearborn Heights actually gets
Dearborn Heights has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment, 5000 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 928 cooling degree days. 1.9°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -2.9°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.75 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Dearborn Heights needs the cold-climate class of unit: past a 25°F design temperature a standard heat pump falls back on resistance backup often enough to eat the savings. Source: NOAA station Detroit Metro Wayne County Ai, 7.5 miles from Dearborn Heights, the closest one on record.
Dearborn Heights's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,604 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,118 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 52 Mcf a year at $10.92 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $818 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 20.72¢/kWh). Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $10,000 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
What would change Dearborn Heights's answer
For the verdict in Dearborn Heights to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 13.6¢/kWh from 20.72¢, or gas climb past $16.68 per Mcf from $10.92. 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 Dearborn Heights; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
Electric resistance heat in Dearborn Heights, compared
Plenty of homes in Dearborn Heights heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Dearborn Heights's answer improves. About $1,755 a year comes back this way, enough that the 5.7-year payback clears the $10,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
How Dearborn Heights compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Dearborn Heights's winter puts it at rank 695 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 654 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.
Next step if you live in Dearborn Heights
Dearborn Heights, Michigan is home to about 61,040 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 Dearborn Heights, 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 2.75 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. At a 1.9°F design temperature, Dearborn Heights sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.