Heat Pump Payback in St. John, IN
St. John, IN: the heat pump payback math
In St. John, 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 $5,500. Running costs here land $174 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. That's St. John's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Checking a different city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just St. John. Look one up here.
How cold St. John actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: St. John racks up 4971 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 864 cooling degree days on the cooling side. -5.3°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -10.7°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.57 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, St. John sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from Lansing Municipal AP, the closest NOAA station, 7.6 miles out.
St. John's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,898 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $960 a year. St. John's gas rate of $11.49 per Mcf, applied to the 52 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $786 a year, against 17.03¢ per kWh for electricity. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $8,110 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
What would change St. John's answer
For the verdict in St. John to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 13.2¢/kWh from 17.03¢, or gas climb past $14.85 per Mcf from $11.49. A utility offering a lower heat pump rate can change this. Until then, no quote price makes a heat pump pay back against gas in St. John; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in St. John has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and St. John's answer improves. About $1,375 a year comes back this way, enough that the 7.3-year payback clears the $10,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
How St. John compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, St. John's winter puts it at rank 763 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1651 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 if you live in St. John
St. John, Indiana is home to about 24,250 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 St. John, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Where St. John's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how St. John's 2.57 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. St. John's -5.3°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.