Menomonee Falls, WI: the heat pump payback math

Here in Menomonee Falls, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $356 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Menomonee Falls's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Menomonee Falls's weather, in the numbers that matter

Degree days tell the story here: Menomonee Falls racks up 5878 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 552 cooling degree days on the cooling side. -2.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -9.4°F on file. 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, Menomonee Falls sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station LAWRENCE J TIMMERMAN AIRPORT, 5.7 miles from Menomonee Falls — the closest one on record.

Menomonee Falls's running-cost comparison, in dollars

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,617 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,149 a year. That compares with roughly 61 Mcf a year of gas at Menomonee Falls's 10.74 per-Mcf rate — about $792 a year — against a local electricity rate of 18.87¢/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 $8,843 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Gas isn't universal in Menomonee Falls — many houses run on electric heat already. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. Switching saves about $1,795 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 4.5 years.

Menomonee Falls against the rest of the country

Among 3206 cities, Menomonee Falls's winter puts it at rank 268 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1009 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 40,700 people in Menomonee Falls

Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin is home to about 40,700 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 Menomonee Falls, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.

Reading further on this page's numbers

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Menomonee Falls's 2.65 seasonal COP and payback figure. Menomonee Falls's -2.2°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.