Heat Pump Payback in Huron, SD
Is a heat pump worth it in Huron?
Huron is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. $5,500 is what Huron would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. Running costs here land $308 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Huron's numbers say wait.
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Landed on Huron by mistake, or want to compare it against somewhere else? Search the other 3206 cities below.
The climate behind Huron's payback figure
6681 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Huron has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 749 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is -18°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -18.4°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.3 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Huron sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from Huron Regional Airport, the closest NOAA station, 2.6 miles out.
Huron's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 7,355 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,131 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 70 Mcf a year at $9.86 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $823 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 14.15¢/kWh). With running costs higher every year, there is no payback at any purchase price; over 15 years, against a like-for-like replacement, a household here would end $10,116 behind.
How sensitive Huron's result is to prices
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Huron if electricity fell to 9.8¢/kWh (from 14.15¢) or gas rose above $14.28 per Mcf (from $9.86). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Huron, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Huron heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Huron's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,400 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 7.1 years.
Huron against the rest of the country
Huron lands at position 65 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 2447 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step if you live in Huron
About 14,515 people live in Huron, South Dakota, 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.
Where Huron's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Huron's 2.3 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Huron's -18°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.