Should Maplewood switch to a heat pump?
Here in Maplewood, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). The heat pump would cost about $184 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Maplewood's numbers say wait.
Why Maplewood's climate drives this number
Maplewood has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5994 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 749 cooling degree days. -5.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -8°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.58 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Maplewood sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, ST PAUL DWTWN HOLMAN FD AP, 6.1 miles from Maplewood.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,883 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,022 a year on electricity. Maplewood's gas rate of 10.98 per Mcf, applied to the 62 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $838 a year, against 15.67¢ 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 $6,265 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Maplewood has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Maplewood's answer improves. About $1,509 a year comes back this way, enough that the 5.3-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
How Maplewood compares nationally
Maplewood lands at position 232 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1027 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.
Deciding what's next in Maplewood, MN
About 40,142 people live in Maplewood, Minnesota, 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.
Reading further on this page's numbers
Every constant behind this page — the 2.58 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Maplewood's -5.1°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here — see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.