Should Dickinson switch to a heat pump?

Here in Dickinson, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). Running costs here land $229 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Dickinson's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Dickinson's weather, in the numbers that matter

Dickinson has one of the harshest winters in the country — 7806 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 443 cooling degree days. -22°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -33°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.3 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Dickinson 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. These numbers come from DICKINSON THEODORE ROOSEVELT, the closest NOAA station, 6.5 miles out.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 8,594 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,069 a year. That compares with roughly 81 Mcf a year of gas at Dickinson's 9.50 per-Mcf rate — about $841 a year — against a local electricity rate of 11.92¢/kWh. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $6,930 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Not every home in Dickinson 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. The saving here runs about $1,355 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.9 years.

How Dickinson compares nationally

Dickinson lands at position 14 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1563 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

Next step for 25,695 people in Dickinson

Dickinson, North Dakota is home to about 25,695 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 Dickinson, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.

Reading further on this page's numbers

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Dickinson's 2.3 seasonal COP and payback figure. Dickinson's -22°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.