Should Greenville switch to a heat pump?

Here in Greenville, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. 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. The heat pump would cost about $332 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Greenville's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Greenville's payback figure

5716 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Greenville has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 707 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -2.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -7.6°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.65 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Greenville sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from OUTAGAMIE CO RGNL AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 1.9 miles out.

Greenville's running-cost comparison, in dollars

Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 5,462 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,144 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 60 Mcf a year at 10.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $812 a year (electricity here runs 18.87¢/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 $8,482 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Not every home in Greenville 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. Switching saves about $1,760 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 4.5 years.

Greenville against the rest of the country

Among 3206 cities, Greenville's winter puts it at rank 311 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2620 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 Greenville, WI

About 13,273 people live in Greenville, 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.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

More on how this number was built

Every constant behind this page — the 2.65 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Greenville's -2.2°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.