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. $3,500 is what Bellwood 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. 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.
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 record low of -9.9°F on file. 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 month-to-month numbers for 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 (electricity here runs 19.06¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $7,099 behind.
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 $8,000 spent up front comes back in about 5.2 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 for 18,132 people 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.