Stevens Point, WI: the heat pump payback math
Here in Stevens Point, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $426 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Stevens Point's numbers say wait.
The climate behind Stevens Point's payback figure
Stevens Point has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 6245 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 495 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -6°F, against a record low of -9.8°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.56 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Stevens Point sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from STEVENS POINT MUNI ARPT, the closest NOAA station, 1.9 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Stevens Point
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 6,177 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,245 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 65 Mcf a year of gas at Stevens Point's 10.74 per-Mcf rate — about $820 a year — against a local electricity rate of 18.87¢/kWh. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs past the 15-year equipment life, for a 15-year net position $9,885 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Gas isn't universal in Stevens Point — 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. Switching saves about $1,860 a year here — a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils — so the extra $8,000 spent up front comes back in about 4.3 years.
Where Stevens Point ranks in this dataset
Stevens Point lands at position 134 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1510 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.
Deciding what's next in Stevens Point, WI
About 26,465 people live in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, 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.
Where Stevens Point's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Stevens Point's 2.56 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Stevens Point's -6°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.