McCordsville, IN: the heat pump payback math

Here in McCordsville, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what McCordsville 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 $180 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's McCordsville's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

McCordsville's weather, in the numbers that matter

Degree days tell the story here: McCordsville racks up 4894 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 779 cooling degree days on the cooling side. -5.8°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -7.8°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.56 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, McCordsville sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, INDIANAPOLIS EXECUTIVE AIRPOR, 19.9 miles from McCordsville.

McCordsville's running-cost comparison, in dollars

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,841 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $937 a year. That compares with roughly 51 Mcf a year of gas at McCordsville's 11.49 per-Mcf rate — about $758 a year — against a local electricity rate of 17.03¢/kWh. 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 $6,199 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Plenty of homes in McCordsville heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $1,345 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.9 years.

McCordsville against the rest of the country

Among 3206 cities, McCordsville's winter puts it at rank 870 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2855 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.

Deciding what's next in McCordsville, IN

McCordsville, Indiana is home to about 11,744 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 McCordsville, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.

Reading further on this page's numbers

Every constant behind this page — the 2.56 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. McCordsville's -5.8°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.