Frankfort, IN: the heat pump payback math

Here in Frankfort, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Frankfort would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $180 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Frankfort's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Frankfort's weather, in the numbers that matter

Frankfort has a real but manageable winter — 4894 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 779 cooling degree days. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -5.8°F here (record low -7.8°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.56 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Frankfort sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from INDIANAPOLIS EXECUTIVE AIRPOR, the closest NOAA station, 22.9 miles out.

The month-to-month numbers for Frankfort

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,841 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $937 a year. That compares with roughly 51 Mcf a year of gas at Frankfort's 11.49 per-Mcf rate — about $758 a year — against a local electricity rate of 17.03¢/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 $6,199 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Frankfort, compared

Plenty of homes in Frankfort 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 $1,345 a year comes back this way, enough that the 5.9-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.

How Frankfort compares nationally

Frankfort lands at position 868 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 2252 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.

Deciding what's next in Frankfort, IN

Frankfort, Indiana is home to about 16,459 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 Frankfort, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Frankfort's 2.56 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Frankfort's -5.8°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.