Heat Pump Payback in Pierre, SD
Pierre, SD: the heat pump payback math
Here in Pierre, 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 $5,500 more up front here. Running costs here land $244 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's Pierre's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Compare against another city
Landed on Pierre by mistake, or want to compare it against somewhere else? Search the other 3206 cities below.
How cold Pierre actually gets
Pierre has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment, 6612 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 825 cooling degree days. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -11.2°F here (coldest 2024 reading -18.9°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.43 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Pierre 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 Pierre Regional Airport, the closest NOAA station, 1.7 miles out.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,890 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,074 a year. That compares with roughly 69 Mcf a year of gas at Pierre's $9.86 per-Mcf rate, about $830 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 14.15¢/kWh. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $9,163 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
The break-even point in Pierre
For the verdict in Pierre to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 10.4¢/kWh from 14.15¢, or gas climb past $13.41 per Mcf from $9.86. A utility offering a lower heat pump rate can change this. Until then, no quote price makes a heat pump pay back against gas in Pierre; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Plenty of homes in Pierre 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. About $1,446 a year comes back this way, enough that the 6.9-year payback clears the $10,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where Pierre ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, Pierre's winter puts it at rank 79 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2548 for population, 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Deciding what's next in Pierre, SD
Pierre, South Dakota is home to about 13,788 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 Pierre, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Where Pierre's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Pierre's 2.43 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -11.2°F design temperature, Pierre sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.