Heat Pump Payback in Decatur, IN
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Decatur, IN
Here in Decatur, 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 $5,500. Running costs here land $128 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Decatur's numbers say wait.
Checking a different city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Decatur. Look one up here.
The climate behind Decatur's payback figure
4861 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Decatur has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 963 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -0.9°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -6°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.68 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Decatur, below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, Fort Wayne International Airp, 17.5 miles from Decatur.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,593 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $922 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 51 Mcf a year of gas at Decatur's $11.49 per-Mcf rate, about $794 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 17.03¢/kWh. With running costs higher every year, there is no payback at any purchase price; over 15 years, against a like-for-like replacement, a household here would end $7,416 behind.
What would change Decatur's answer
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Decatur if electricity fell to 14.0¢/kWh (from 17.03¢) or gas rose above $14.01 per Mcf (from $11.49). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Decatur, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
Electric resistance heat in Decatur, compared
Plenty of homes in Decatur heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Against electric-resistance heat, baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance, the case for switching gets stronger here. About $1,387 a year comes back this way, enough that the 7.2-year payback clears the $10,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where Decatur ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Decatur comes in at 897 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 3187 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step if you live in Decatur
About 10,072 people live in Decatur, 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.
Where Decatur's figure comes from
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Decatur's 2.68 seasonal COP and payback figure. Decatur's -0.9°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.