Heat Pump Payback in Menomonie, WI
Should Menomonie switch to a heat pump?
In Menomonie, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $5,500. Running costs here land $399 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Menomonie's numbers say wait.
Not the city you meant?
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Menomonie. Look one up here.
The climate behind Menomonie's payback figure
6025 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Menomonie has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 612 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is -5.8°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -7.8°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.56 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Menomonie needs the cold-climate class of unit: past a 25°F design temperature a standard heat pump falls back on resistance backup often enough to eat the savings. These numbers come from Menomonie Municipal Airport-S, the closest NOAA station, 2 miles out.
The yearly running costs in Menomonie
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,959 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,223 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 63 Mcf a year at $10.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $824 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 18.87¢/kWh). 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 $11,491 behind.
How sensitive Menomonie's result is to prices
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Menomonie if electricity fell to 11.8¢/kWh (from 18.87¢) or gas rose above $17.11 per Mcf (from $10.74). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Menomonie, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Gas isn't universal in Menomonie, many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Menomonie's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,805 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.5 years.
Where Menomonie ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, Menomonie's winter puts it at rank 215 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2224 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 Menomonie, WI
About 16,709 people live in Menomonie, 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.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Menomonie's 2.56 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Menomonie's -5.8°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.