Should West Lafayette switch to a heat pump?
Here in West Lafayette, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what West Lafayette 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. The heat pump would cost about $167 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. That's West Lafayette's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
How cold West Lafayette actually gets
Degree days tell the story here: West Lafayette racks up 4684 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1024 cooling degree days on the cooling side. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -8°F here (record low -9°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.51 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in West Lafayette — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. These numbers come from PURDUE UNIVERSITY AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 2.3 miles out.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,725 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $953 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 49 Mcf a year at 11.49 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $787 a year (electricity here runs 17.03¢/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 $6,003 behind.
Electric resistance heat in West Lafayette, compared
Plenty of homes in West Lafayette heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. 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 $1,292 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 6.2 years.
West Lafayette against the rest of the country
West Lafayette lands at position 1016 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 884 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 Lafayette, IN
West Lafayette, Indiana is home to about 46,338 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 West Lafayette, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how West Lafayette's 2.51 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. West Lafayette's -8°F design temperature is below the 25°F line, which is why a cold-climate unit is the right call here — see what that changes in the cold-climate unit guide.