Is a heat pump worth it in Shoreview?

Here in Shoreview, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Shoreview 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. Running costs here land $206 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Shoreview's numbers say wait.

Why Shoreview's climate drives this number

Shoreview has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6039 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 779 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -7.6°F, against a record low of -7.6°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.52 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Shoreview 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. Source: NOAA station ANOKA CO-BLNE AP(JNS FD) AP, 5.9 miles from Shoreview — the closest one on record.

The month-to-month numbers for Shoreview

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,068 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,055 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 63 Mcf a year at 10.98 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $849 a year (electricity here runs 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 $6,593 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Gas isn't universal in Shoreview — many houses run on electric heat already. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Shoreview's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,499 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.3 years.

Where Shoreview ranks in this dataset

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Shoreview comes in at 206 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 1482 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 Shoreview

About 26,939 people live in Shoreview, 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.

Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.

Reading further on this page's numbers

Every constant behind this page — the 2.52 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. At a -7.6°F design temperature, Shoreview sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.