Is a heat pump worth it in Red Wing?
In Red Wing, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $193 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Red Wing's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
How cold Red Wing actually gets
5607 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Red Wing has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 705 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -7.6°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -13°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.52 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Red Wing — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, RED WING REGIONAL AIRPORT, 5.9 miles from Red Wing.
The month-to-month numbers for Red Wing
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,634 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $977 a year. That compares with roughly 58 Mcf a year of gas at Red Wing's 10.98 per-Mcf rate — about $784 a year — against a local electricity rate of 15.67¢/kWh. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $6,390 behind.
Electric resistance heat in Red Wing, compared
Gas isn't universal in Red Wing — many houses run on electric heat already. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $1,391 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.8 years.
Red Wing against the rest of the country
Among 3206 cities, Red Wing's winter puts it at rank 337 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2214 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.
Next step for 16,788 people in Red Wing
Red Wing, Minnesota is home to about 16,788 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 Red Wing, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Where Red Wing's figure comes from
Every constant behind this page — the 2.52 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Red Wing'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.