Heat Pump Payback in New Franklin, OH
Is a heat pump worth it in New Franklin?
Here in New Franklin, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $5,500 is what New Franklin would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. Running costs here land $21 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: New Franklin's numbers say wait.
Compare against another city
New Franklin is one of 3206 cities covered here, each run through the same model. Search another below.
Why New Franklin's climate drives this number
Degree days tell the story here: New Franklin racks up 5050 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 932 cooling degree days on the cooling side. 6.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of 1.9°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.85 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. New Franklin 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 Akron-Canton Regional Airport, 7.8 miles from New Franklin, the closest one on record.
The yearly running costs in New Franklin
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,487 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $972 a year on electricity. New Franklin's gas rate of $13.85 per Mcf, applied to the 53 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $951 a year, against 18.40¢ 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 $5,817 behind.
The break-even point in New Franklin
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in New Franklin if electricity fell to 17.9¢/kWh (from 18.40¢) or gas rose above $14.25 per Mcf (from $13.85). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in New Franklin, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in New Franklin has gas service. 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 $1,603 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 6.2 years.
Where New Franklin ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, New Franklin comes in at 653 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 2536 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 if you live in New Franklin
About 13,859 people live in New Franklin, Ohio, 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.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Reading further on this page's numbers
Every constant behind this page, the 2.85 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. New Franklin's 6.1°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.