Heat Pump Payback in New Berlin, WI
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. $5,500 is what New Berlin would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. 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.
Not the city you meant?
New Berlin is one of 3206 cities covered here, each run through the same model. Search another below.
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, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -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 yearly running costs in 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 with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 18.87¢/kWh. 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 $12,067 behind.
How sensitive New Berlin's result is to prices
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in New Berlin if electricity fell to 11.6¢/kWh (from 18.87¢) or gas rose above $17.42 per Mcf (from $10.74). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in New Berlin, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
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 $10,000 spent up front comes back in about 5.4 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.