South Sioux City, NE: the heat pump payback math
South Sioux City 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 $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. Running costs here land $53 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: South Sioux City's numbers say wait.
Why South Sioux City's climate drives this number
5768 heating degree days pile up here every year, so South Sioux City has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 858 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -15°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -20°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.34 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, South Sioux City sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station SIOUX GATEWAY/COL BUD DAY FIE, 5.2 miles from South Sioux City — the closest one on record.
South Sioux City's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,242 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $878 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 60 Mcf a year at 11.40 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $825 a year (electricity here runs 12.59¢/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 $4,297 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in South Sioux City heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. About $1,101 a year comes back this way, enough that the 7.3-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
How South Sioux City compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, South Sioux City comes in at 295 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2527 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 South Sioux City
About 13,910 people live in South Sioux City, Nebraska, 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.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how South Sioux City's 2.34 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. South Sioux City's -15°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.