Mounds View, MN: the heat pump payback math
Here in Mounds View, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Mounds View 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 $206 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Mounds View's numbers say wait.
Why Mounds View's climate drives this number
Mounds View has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6039 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 779 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -7.6°F, against a record low of -7.6°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.52 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Mounds View 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. Source: NOAA station ANOKA CO-BLNE AP(JNS FD) AP, 3 miles from Mounds View — the closest one on record.
Mounds View's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,068 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,055 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 63 Mcf a year at 10.98 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $849 a year (electricity here runs 15.67¢/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 $6,593 behind.
Electric resistance heat in Mounds View, compared
Not every home in Mounds View has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Mounds View's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,499 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 Mounds View compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Mounds View comes in at 213 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2676 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 for 12,841 people in Mounds View
About 12,841 people live in Mounds View, Minnesota, 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
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Mounds View's 2.52 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Mounds View's -7.6°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.