Heat Pump Payback in Glendale, WI
Will a heat pump pay off in Glendale, WI?
In Glendale, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $5,500. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $356 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Glendale's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Checking a different city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Glendale. Look one up here.
How cold Glendale actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: Glendale racks up 5878 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 552 cooling degree days on the cooling side. -2.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -9.4°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.65 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Glendale 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. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, Lawrence J Timmerman Airport, 5.4 miles from Glendale.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 5,617 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,149 a year. That compares with roughly 61 Mcf a year of gas at Glendale's $10.74 per-Mcf rate, about $792 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 18.87¢/kWh. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $10,843 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
The break-even point in Glendale
For the verdict in Glendale to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 12.2¢/kWh from 18.87¢, or gas climb past $16.56 per Mcf from $10.74. 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 Glendale; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
Electric resistance heat in Glendale, compared
Not every home in Glendale has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Glendale's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,795 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.6 years.
How Glendale compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Glendale's winter puts it at rank 271 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2466 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.
Deciding what's next in Glendale, WI
Glendale, Wisconsin is home to about 14,381 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 Glendale, 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
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Glendale's 2.65 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Glendale's -2.2°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.