Heat Pump Payback in Ravenna, OH
Should Ravenna switch to a heat pump?
Ravenna is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $5,500. The heat pump would cost about $50 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces, a premium with no payback. That's Ravenna's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
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Ravenna is one of 3206 cities covered here, each run through the same model. Search another below.
How cold Ravenna actually gets
Ravenna has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment, 5312 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 563 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is 7°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was 1.4°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.87 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Ravenna sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from Portage County Airport, the closest NOAA station, 3.9 miles out.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,687 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $951 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 55 Mcf a year at $13.85 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $900 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 18.40¢/kWh). Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $6,253 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
The break-even point in Ravenna
For the verdict in Ravenna to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 17.3¢/kWh from 18.40¢, or gas climb past $14.76 per Mcf from $13.85. 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 Ravenna; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Ravenna heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Ravenna's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,659 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 6 years.
How Ravenna compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Ravenna comes in at 479 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 2936 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 Ravenna
Ravenna, Ohio is home to about 11,236 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 Ravenna, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Where Ravenna's figure comes from
Every constant behind this page, the 2.87 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. Ravenna's 7°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.