Heat Pump Payback in Defiance, OH
Should Defiance switch to a heat pump?
Defiance is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $5,500. The heat pump would cost about $68 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces, a premium with no payback. That's Defiance's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
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How cold Defiance actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: Defiance racks up 4930 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 961 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 -0.9°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -4°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.68 for the recommended cold-climate unit. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Defiance, below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. These numbers come from Defiance Memorial Airport, the closest NOAA station, 5.1 miles out.
The yearly running costs in Defiance
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,658 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,008 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 51 Mcf a year at $13.85 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $940 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 18.40¢/kWh). Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $6,513 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
How sensitive Defiance's result is to prices
For the verdict in Defiance to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 16.8¢/kWh from 18.40¢, or gas climb past $15.17 per Mcf from $13.85. 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 Defiance; 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 Defiance heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Defiance's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,518 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 6.6 years.
How Defiance compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Defiance comes in at 832 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 2178 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 Defiance
Defiance, Ohio is home to about 17,180 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 Defiance, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Defiance's 2.68 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Defiance's -0.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.