Should Richfield switch to a heat pump?

Here in Richfield, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Richfield would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $198 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Richfield's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Richfield's payback figure

6022 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Richfield has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 833 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -7.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -8°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.53 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Richfield 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 MINNEAPOLIS-ST PAUL INTERNATI, the closest NOAA station, 2.7 miles out.

Richfield's running-cost comparison, in dollars

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,027 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,056 a year. That compares with roughly 63 Mcf a year of gas at Richfield's 10.98 per-Mcf rate — about $858 a year — against a local electricity rate of 15.67¢/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 $6,469 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Gas isn't universal in Richfield — 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 $1,503 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.3 years.

How Richfield compares nationally

Richfield lands at position 222 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1132 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 36,491 people in Richfield

About 36,491 people live in Richfield, Minnesota, and every number on this page is what a contractor would actually work from when quoting a system here — the point isn't to replace that quote, it's to tell you whether to bother asking for one. Here, there's no cost penalty to waiting until your current furnace or AC actually needs replacing.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Richfield's 2.53 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -7.1°F design temperature, Richfield sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.