Is a heat pump worth it in La Crosse?
In La Crosse, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. $3,500 is what La Crosse would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Running costs here land $381 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: La Crosse's numbers say wait.
Why La Crosse's climate drives this number
5707 heating degree days pile up here every year, so La Crosse has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 807 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -8°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 2.51 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, La Crosse sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station LA CROSSE MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, 4 miles from La Crosse — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for La Crosse
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,757 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,216 a year. La Crosse's gas rate of 10.74 per Mcf, applied to the 59 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $836 a year, against 18.87¢ per kWh for electricity. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs past the 15-year equipment life, for a 15-year net position $9,208 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in La Crosse heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. 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 $1,708 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 4.7 years.
How La Crosse compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, La Crosse's winter puts it at rank 313 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 799 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.
What to do with this number in La Crosse
About 51,049 people live in La Crosse, 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.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Where La Crosse's figure comes from
Every constant behind this page — the 2.51 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. At a -8°F design temperature, La Crosse sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.