Should Onalaska switch to a heat pump?

Onalaska is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. 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). Running costs here land $381 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Onalaska's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

How cold Onalaska actually gets

Onalaska has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5707 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 807 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -8°F, against a record low of -11.9°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.51 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Onalaska sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station LA CROSSE MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, 2.5 miles from Onalaska — the closest one on record.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 5,757 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,216 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 59 Mcf a year at 10.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $836 a year (electricity here runs 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 $9,208 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Not every home in Onalaska has gas service. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $1,708 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 4.7 years.

Where Onalaska ranks in this dataset

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Onalaska comes in at 314 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 1936 by population, where 1 is largest. 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 Onalaska

Onalaska, Wisconsin is home to about 19,898 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 Onalaska, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.

Reading further on this page's numbers

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Onalaska's 2.51 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -8°F design temperature, Onalaska sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.