Is a heat pump worth it in Madison?

Madison is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. $3,500 is what Madison 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. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $11 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Madison's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

How cold Madison actually gets

3632 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Madison has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1460 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. 5°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 1.9°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.82 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Madison sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station BOWMAN FIELD AIRPORT, 39.4 miles from Madison — the closest one on record.

The month-to-month numbers for Madison

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 3,261 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $767 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 38 Mcf a year at 11.49 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $757 a year (electricity here runs 17.03¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $3,658 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Madison, compared

Not every home in Madison 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 $1,121 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 7.1 years.

Madison against the rest of the country

Among 3206 cities, Madison's winter puts it at rank 1729 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2797 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.

What to do with this number in Madison

Madison, Indiana is home to about 12,108 people, and the figures above are the same ones a local HVAC contractor uses to size and quote a system — this site doesn't guess where a real quote would land, it just tells you whether it's worth asking for one. In Madison, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

Reading further on this page's numbers

Every constant behind this page — the 2.82 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Madison's 5°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.