Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Wausau, WI

Here in Wausau, 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). The heat pump would cost about $475 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. That's Wausau's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Wausau's weather, in the numbers that matter

6615 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Wausau has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 415 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is -7.1°F, against a record low of -9°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.53 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Wausau 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 WAUSAU DOWNTOWN AIRPORT, 2.4 miles from Wausau — the closest one on record.

The month-to-month numbers for Wausau

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,621 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,316 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 69 Mcf a year at 10.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $841 a year (electricity here runs 18.87¢/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 $10,620 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Plenty of homes in Wausau heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Wausau's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,946 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 4.1 years.

Where Wausau ranks in this dataset

Wausau lands at position 77 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1023 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 Wausau, WI

Wausau, Wisconsin is home to about 40,262 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 Wausau, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

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 Wausau's 2.53 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a -7.1°F design temperature, Wausau sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.