Milwaukee, WI: the heat pump payback math

Here in Milwaukee, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Milwaukee 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 $293 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Milwaukee's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Milwaukee's weather, in the numbers that matter

Milwaukee has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5284 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 652 cooling degree days. -0.4°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -7.1°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.69 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Milwaukee — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station MILWAUKEE, 4.5 miles from Milwaukee — the closest one on record.

The month-to-month numbers for Milwaukee

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,974 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,043 a year. That compares with roughly 55 Mcf a year of gas at Milwaukee's 10.74 per-Mcf rate — about $750 a year — against a local electricity rate of 18.87¢/kWh. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $7,895 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Not every home in Milwaukee has gas service. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. The saving here runs about $1,641 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 4.9 years.

How Milwaukee compares nationally

Milwaukee lands at position 505 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 31 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

Deciding what's next in Milwaukee, WI

Milwaukee, Wisconsin is home to about 563,531 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 Milwaukee, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

Where Milwaukee's figure comes from

Every constant behind this page — the 2.69 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Milwaukee's -0.4°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.