Should Mendota Heights switch to a heat pump?
In Mendota Heights, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. $3,500 is what Mendota Heights 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 $198 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Mendota Heights's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
How cold Mendota Heights actually gets
Mendota Heights has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6022 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 833 cooling degree days. -7.1°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 2.53 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Mendota Heights — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station MINNEAPOLIS-ST PAUL INTERNATI, 4.7 miles from Mendota Heights — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for Mendota Heights
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 6,027 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,056 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 63 Mcf a year at 10.98 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $858 a year (electricity here runs 15.67¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $6,469 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Mendota Heights has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Mendota Heights's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,503 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 5.3 years.
How Mendota Heights compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Mendota Heights's winter puts it at rank 223 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2888 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.
Next step for 11,542 people in Mendota Heights
Mendota Heights, Minnesota is home to about 11,542 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 Mendota Heights, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Where Mendota Heights's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Mendota Heights's 2.53 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Mendota Heights's -7.1°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.