Is a heat pump worth it in Great Bend?
The payback math works in Great Bend on paper, past the equipment's own working life. 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. Great Bend's residents would see roughly $146 a year back in running costs, putting the payback around 24 years. Great Bend's own numbers say this pencils out only in theory, not in practice.
The climate behind Great Bend's payback figure
Great Bend has a real but manageable winter — 4251 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, at 1588 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 -11.9°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.63 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Great Bend 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. Source: NOAA station GREAT BEND MUNICIPAL ARPT, 3.7 miles from Great Bend — the closest one on record.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,093 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $820 a year. That compares with roughly 44 Mcf a year of gas at Great Bend's 14.81 per-Mcf rate — about $965 a year — against a local electricity rate of 15.05¢/kWh. Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is roughly 92.7 years, leaving the 15-year total $1,315 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in Great Bend 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 $1,110 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 7.2 years.
Great Bend against the rest of the country
Among 3206 cities, Great Bend's winter puts it at rank 1378 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2475 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
What to do with this number in Great Bend
About 14,306 people live in Great Bend, Kansas, 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 Great Bend's 2.63 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Great Bend's -2.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.