Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Pleasant Hill, IA

Here in Pleasant Hill, 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). The heat pump would cost about $66 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. That's Pleasant Hill's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

How cold Pleasant Hill actually gets

Pleasant Hill has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5300 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 961 cooling degree days. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -7.6°F here (record low -16.6°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.52 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Pleasant Hill sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station ANKENY REGIONAL AIRPORT, 7.1 miles from Pleasant Hill — the closest one on record.

The month-to-month numbers for Pleasant Hill

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,326 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $818 a year. That compares with roughly 55 Mcf a year of gas at Pleasant Hill's 10.61 per-Mcf rate — about $751 a year — against a local electricity rate of 13.31¢/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 $4,497 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Not every home in Pleasant Hill 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. The saving here runs about $1,134 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 7.1 years.

How Pleasant Hill compares nationally

Pleasant Hill lands at position 487 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 2815 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

Next step for 11,942 people in Pleasant Hill

Pleasant Hill, Iowa is home to about 11,942 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 Pleasant Hill, 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

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Pleasant Hill's 2.52 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Pleasant Hill's -7.6°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here — see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.