Is a heat pump worth it in Greendale?

Here in Greendale, 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). The heat pump would cost about $298 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Greendale's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Greendale's payback figure

Degree days tell the story here: Greendale racks up 5229 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 806 cooling degree days on the cooling side. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -2.9°F here (record low -5.1°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.63 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Greendale — 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, 5 miles from Greendale.

Greendale'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. Greendale's gas rate of 10.74 per Mcf, applied to the 54 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $782 a year, against 18.87¢ per kWh for electricity. 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 $7,965 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Not every home in Greendale has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Greendale's answer improves. About $1,616 a year comes back this way, enough that the 5-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.

How Greendale compares nationally

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Greendale comes in at 546 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2452 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

Next step for 14,455 people in Greendale

About 14,455 people live in Greendale, 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.

Reading further on this page's numbers

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Greendale's 2.63 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Greendale's -2.9°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.