Heat Pump Payback in Suamico, WI
Is a heat pump worth it in Suamico?
Suamico 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 $5,500. The heat pump would cost about $366 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces, a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Suamico's numbers say wait.
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The climate behind Suamico's payback figure
Degree days tell the story here: Suamico racks up 5968 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 605 cooling degree days on the cooling side. -2.9°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -9°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.63 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Suamico 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. These numbers come from Austin Straubel International, the closest NOAA station, 11.4 miles out.
Suamico's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,746 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,182 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 62 Mcf a year at $10.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $815 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 18.87¢/kWh). With running costs higher every year, there is no payback at any purchase price; over 15 years, against a like-for-like replacement, a household here would end $10,991 behind.
The break-even point in Suamico
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Suamico if electricity fell to 12.2¢/kWh (from 18.87¢) or gas rose above $16.63 per Mcf (from $10.74). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Suamico, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Suamico has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Suamico's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,818 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.5 years.
How Suamico compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Suamico comes in at 252 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 2638 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step if you live in Suamico
About 13,109 people live in Suamico, 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.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
More on how this number was built
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Suamico's 2.63 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a -2.9°F design temperature, Suamico sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.