Should Franklin switch to a heat pump?

Here in Franklin, 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). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $298 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Franklin's numbers say wait.

Why Franklin's climate drives this number

Franklin has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5229 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 806 cooling degree days. -2.9°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -5.1°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.63 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Franklin — 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, GENERAL MITCHELL INTERNATIONA, 7.3 miles from Franklin.

Franklin's running-cost comparison, in dollars

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,034 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,080 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 54 Mcf a year at 10.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $782 a year (electricity here runs 18.87¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $7,965 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Franklin, compared

Plenty of homes in Franklin heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Franklin's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,616 a year here — a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils — so the extra $8,000 spent up front comes back in about 5 years.

How Franklin compares nationally

Among 3206 cities, Franklin's winter puts it at rank 542 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1129 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

Next step for 36,591 people in Franklin

About 36,591 people live in Franklin, Wisconsin, 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.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Franklin's 2.63 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Franklin's -2.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.