Will a heat pump pay off in Janesville, WI?
Janesville is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. 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. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $334 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Janesville's numbers say wait.
Why Janesville's climate drives this number
Janesville has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5393 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 828 cooling degree days. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -5.8°F here (record low -14.8°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.56 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Janesville sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, ROCK COUNTY AIRPORT, 4.8 miles from Janesville.
Janesville's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,334 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,140 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 56 Mcf a year at 10.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $806 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 $8,511 behind.
Electric resistance heat in Janesville, compared
Plenty of homes in Janesville heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Janesville's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,640 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 4.9 years.
Janesville against the rest of the country
Janesville lands at position 431 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 592 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.
What to do with this number in Janesville
About 66,428 people live in Janesville, 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
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Janesville's 2.56 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Janesville's -5.8°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.