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 $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. 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.
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, against a record low of -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 month-to-month numbers for 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 (electricity here runs 18.40¢/kWh). Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is longer than the 15-year equipment life, leaving the 15-year total $4,513 behind.
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 $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.3 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.