Is a heat pump worth it in New Berlin?
Here in New Berlin, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what New Berlin 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. Running costs here land $438 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: New Berlin's numbers say wait.
The climate behind New Berlin's payback figure
New Berlin has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6294 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 394 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -5.8°F, against a record low of -11.2°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.56 for the recommended cold-climate unit. New Berlin 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 WAUKESHA COUNTY AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 7.2 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for New Berlin
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 6,225 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,238 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 66 Mcf a year of gas at New Berlin's 10.74 per-Mcf rate — about $800 a year — against a local electricity rate of 18.87¢/kWh. 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 $10,067 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in New Berlin heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. Switching saves about $1,866 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 4.3 years.
Where New Berlin ranks in this dataset
New Berlin lands at position 118 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1021 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.
What to do with this number in New Berlin
About 40,302 people live in New Berlin, 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.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
More on how this number was built
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind New Berlin's 2.56 seasonal COP and payback figure. New Berlin's -5.8°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.