Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Perrysburg, OH
Perrysburg 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). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $2 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Perrysburg's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
How cold Perrysburg actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: Perrysburg racks up 4346 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1312 cooling degree days on the cooling side. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is 1.9°F, against a record low of 0°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.75 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Perrysburg 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 METCALF FIELD AIRPORT, 8.9 miles from Perrysburg — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for Perrysburg
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,002 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $942 a year. That compares with roughly 45 Mcf a year of gas at Perrysburg's 13.85 per-Mcf rate — about $940 a year — against a local electricity rate of 18.40¢/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 $3,536 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in Perrysburg has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Perrysburg's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,396 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 5.7 years.
Perrysburg against the rest of the country
Perrysburg lands at position 1285 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1584 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
What to do with this number in Perrysburg
Perrysburg, Ohio is home to about 25,313 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 Perrysburg, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
More on how this number was built
Every constant behind this page — the 2.75 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. At a 1.9°F design temperature, Perrysburg sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.