Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Berwyn, IL

Berwyn is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $151 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Berwyn's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Berwyn's weather, in the numbers that matter

Degree days tell the story here: Berwyn racks up 4543 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1348 cooling degree days on the cooling side. 1.9°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -9°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.75 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Berwyn sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from CHICAGO MIDWAY INTL ARPT, the closest NOAA station, 4.4 miles out.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,183 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,016 a year. Berwyn's gas rate of 11.25 per Mcf, applied to the 47 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $865 a year, against 19.06¢ per kWh for electricity. Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $5,767 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Gas isn't universal in Berwyn — many houses run on electric heat already. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. The saving here runs about $1,509 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.3 years.

Where Berwyn ranks in this dataset

Among 3206 cities, Berwyn's winter puts it at rank 1150 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 745 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.

Next step for 55,152 people in Berwyn

Berwyn, Illinois is home to about 55,152 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 Berwyn, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.

More on how this number was built

Every constant behind this page — the 2.75 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Berwyn's 1.9°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.