Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Sault Ste. Marie, MI
In Sault Ste. Marie, 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. The heat pump would cost about $594 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Sault Ste. Marie's numbers say wait.
Why Sault Ste. Marie's climate drives this number
Sault Ste. Marie has one of the harshest winters in the country — 7024 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers rarely ask much of an air conditioner, at 270 cooling degree days. -4°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -5.1°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.6 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Sault Ste. Marie sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station SAULT STE MARIE MUNI/SASN FIE, 0.7 miles from Sault Ste. Marie — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for Sault Ste. Marie
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,841 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,465 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 73 Mcf a year at 10.92 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $871 a year (electricity here runs 20.72¢/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 $12,406 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Gas isn't universal in Sault Ste. Marie — many houses run on electric heat already. 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 $2,293 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 3.5 years.
Sault Ste. Marie against the rest of the country
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Sault Ste. Marie comes in at 46 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2612 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 Sault Ste. Marie
About 13,288 people live in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, 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.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Where Sault Ste. Marie's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Sault Ste. Marie's 2.6 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Sault Ste. Marie's -4°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.