Heat Pump Payback in Bellwood, IL
Will a heat pump pay off in Bellwood, IL?
Bellwood is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. $5,500 is what Bellwood would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $240 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Bellwood's numbers say wait.
Checking a different city
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Bellwood. Look one up here.
Why Bellwood's climate drives this number
Bellwood has a real but manageable winter, 4837 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, at 1162 cooling degree days. -5.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here, the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day, with a low of -9.9°F in the 2024 station record. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.58 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Bellwood, below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station Chicago O'Hare International, 6.1 miles from Bellwood, the closest one on record.
The yearly running costs in Bellwood
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,747 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,094 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 50 Mcf a year at $11.25 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $854 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 19.06¢/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 $9,099 behind.
The break-even point in Bellwood
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Bellwood if electricity fell to 13.4¢/kWh (from 19.06¢) or gas rose above $16.01 per Mcf (from $11.25). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Bellwood, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
Electric resistance heat in Bellwood, compared
Plenty of homes in Bellwood heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Bellwood's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,528 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 6.5 years.
Where Bellwood ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Bellwood comes in at 921 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 2080 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step if you live in Bellwood
About 18,132 people live in Bellwood, 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.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
Where Bellwood's figure comes from
Every constant behind this page, the 2.58 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. Bellwood's -5.1°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.