Heat Pump Payback in Menasha, WI
Menasha, WI: the heat pump payback math
Here in Menasha, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $5,500 is what Menasha would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. Running costs here land $332 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Menasha's numbers say wait.
Checking a different city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Menasha. Look one up here.
The climate behind Menasha's payback figure
5716 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Menasha has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 707 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -2.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -7.6°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.65 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Menasha sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from Outagamie Co Regional Airport, the closest NOAA station, 5.8 miles out.
Menasha's running-cost comparison, in dollars
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,462 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,144 a year on electricity. Menasha's gas rate of $10.74 per Mcf, applied to the 60 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $812 a year, against 18.87¢ per kWh for electricity. With running costs higher every year, there is no payback at any purchase price; over 15 years, against a like-for-like replacement, a household here would end $10,482 behind.
What would change Menasha's answer
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Menasha if electricity fell to 12.4¢/kWh (from 18.87¢) or gas rose above $16.32 per Mcf (from $10.74). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Menasha, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
Electric resistance heat in Menasha, compared
Plenty of homes in Menasha heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Menasha's answer improves. About $1,760 a year comes back this way, enough that the 5.7-year payback clears the $10,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where Menasha ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Menasha comes in at 308 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 2057 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step if you live in Menasha
About 18,433 people live in Menasha, 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
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Menasha's 2.65 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a -2.2°F design temperature, Menasha sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.