Heat pump vs. gas furnace in New Haven, IN
Here in New Haven, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $128 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's New Haven's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
How cold New Haven actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: New Haven racks up 4861 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 963 cooling degree days on the cooling side. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -0.9°F here (record low -6°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.68 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in New Haven — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station FORT WAYNE INTERNATIONAL AIRP, 11.9 miles from New Haven — the closest one on record.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,593 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $922 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 51 Mcf a year at 11.49 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $794 a year (electricity here runs 17.03¢/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 $5,416 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in New Haven has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and New Haven's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,387 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 5.8 years.
Where New Haven ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, New Haven comes in at 891 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2278 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Deciding what's next in New Haven, IN
New Haven, Indiana is home to about 16,200 people, and the figures above are the same ones a local HVAC contractor uses to size and quote a system — this site doesn't guess where a real quote would land, it just tells you whether it's worth asking for one. In New Haven, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
Reading further on this page's numbers
Every constant behind this page — the 2.68 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. At a -0.9°F design temperature, New Haven sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.