Will a heat pump pay off in Bartlett, IL?
Here in Bartlett, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Bartlett 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 $295 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Bartlett's numbers say wait.
Why Bartlett's climate drives this number
5064 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Bartlett has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 915 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. -7.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -14.1°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.53 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Bartlett — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station DUPAGE AIRPORT, 4.8 miles from Bartlett — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for Bartlett
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,068 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,115 a year. Bartlett's gas rate of 11.25 per Mcf, applied to the 53 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $819 a year, against 19.06¢ per kWh for electricity. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs past the 15-year equipment life, for a 15-year net position $7,930 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Bartlett has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Bartlett's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,555 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 5.1 years.
Where Bartlett ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, Bartlett's winter puts it at rank 627 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1008 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 Bartlett, IL
About 40,718 people live in Bartlett, Illinois, 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.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Where Bartlett's figure comes from
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Bartlett's 2.53 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Bartlett's -7.1°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.