Should West Bend switch to a heat pump?
Here in West Bend, 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 $409 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: West Bend's numbers say wait.
Why West Bend's climate drives this number
West Bend has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment — 5993 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers rarely ask much of an air conditioner, at 266 cooling degree days. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -4°F here (record low -9.4°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.6 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. West Bend 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 WEST BEND MUNICIPAL ARPT, 2.4 miles from West Bend — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for West Bend
Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 5,837 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,144 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 62 Mcf a year at 10.74 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $735 a year (electricity here runs 18.87¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $9,632 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in West Bend 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. The saving here runs about $1,784 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 4.5 years.
How West Bend compares nationally
West Bend lands at position 242 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1271 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 West Bend, WI
About 32,149 people live in West Bend, 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.
More on how this number was built
Every constant behind this page — the 2.6 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. West Bend's -4°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.