Heat Pump Payback in Yankton, SD
Yankton, SD: the heat pump payback math
Yankton 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. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $230 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Yankton's numbers say wait.
Compare against another city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Yankton. Look one up here.
The climate behind Yankton's payback figure
Yankton has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment, 6007 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 853 cooling degree days. -13°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -18.9°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.39 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Yankton, below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station Chan Gurney Municipal Airport, 1.6 miles from Yankton, the closest one on record.
The yearly running costs in Yankton
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 6,364 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,003 a year. That compares with roughly 63 Mcf a year of gas at Yankton's $9.86 per-Mcf rate, about $773 a year with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 14.15¢/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 $8,953 behind.
The break-even point in Yankton
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Yankton if electricity fell to 10.3¢/kWh (from 14.15¢) or gas rose above $13.54 per Mcf (from $9.86). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Yankton, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Yankton has gas service. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. Switching saves about $1,305 a year here, a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils, so the extra $10,000 spent up front comes back in about 7.7 years.
Yankton against the rest of the country
Among 3206 cities, Yankton's winter puts it at rank 228 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2329 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.
Next step if you live in Yankton
About 15,670 people live in Yankton, South Dakota, 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
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Yankton's 2.39 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -13°F design temperature, Yankton sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.