West Allis, WI: the heat pump payback math
In West Allis, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. $3,500 is what West Allis would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $356 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: West Allis's numbers say wait.
The climate behind West Allis's payback figure
5878 heating degree days pile up here every year, so West Allis has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 552 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -2.2°F here (record low -9.4°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.65 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, West Allis sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from LAWRENCE J TIMMERMAN AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 7 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for West Allis
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,617 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,149 a year. That compares with roughly 61 Mcf a year of gas at West Allis's 10.74 per-Mcf rate — about $792 a year — against a local electricity rate of 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 $8,843 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in West Allis 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 $1,795 a year comes back this way, enough that the 4.5-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where West Allis ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, West Allis's winter puts it at rank 265 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 675 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.
Deciding what's next in West Allis, WI
About 59,784 people live in West Allis, 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.
Reading further on this page's numbers
Every constant behind this page — the 2.65 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. West Allis's -2.2°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.