Heat Pump Payback in Neenah, WI
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Neenah, WI
Neenah is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. 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 $332 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Neenah's numbers say wait.
Checking a different city
Neenah is one of 3206 cities covered here, each run through the same model. Search another below.
Why Neenah's climate drives this number
5716 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Neenah has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 707 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -2.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -7.6°F in the 2024 station record. 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, Neenah sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, Outagamie Co Regional Airport, 7.3 miles from Neenah.
The yearly running costs in Neenah
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,462 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,144 a year on electricity. Neenah's gas rate of $10.74 per Mcf, applied to the 60 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $812 a year, against 18.87¢ per kWh for electricity. 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 $10,482 behind.
How sensitive Neenah's result is to prices
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Neenah if electricity fell to 12.4¢/kWh (from 18.87¢) or gas rose above $16.32 per Mcf (from $10.74). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Neenah, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in Neenah has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Neenah's answer improves. About $1,760 a year comes back this way, enough that the 5.7-year payback clears the $10,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where Neenah ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, Neenah's winter puts it at rank 306 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1456 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.
What to do with this number in Neenah
About 27,502 people live in Neenah, 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.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Neenah's 2.65 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Neenah's -2.2°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.