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 $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. 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.
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 record low of -7.6°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, 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 RGNL AIRPORT, 7.3 miles from Neenah.
The month-to-month numbers for 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 its running cost near $812 a year, against 18.87¢ per kWh for electricity. Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is longer than the 15-year equipment life, leaving the 15-year total $8,482 behind.
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 4.5-year payback clears the $8,000 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.