Bourbonnais, IL: the heat pump payback math
In Bourbonnais, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. $3,500 is what Bourbonnais 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. Running costs here land $255 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Bourbonnais's numbers say wait.
Why Bourbonnais's climate drives this number
5005 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Bourbonnais 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. -3.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -11.2°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.63 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Bourbonnais sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station GREATER KANKAKEE AIRPORT, 7.9 miles from Bourbonnais — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for Bourbonnais
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,819 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,067 a year. That compares with roughly 52 Mcf a year of gas at Bourbonnais's 11.25 per-Mcf rate — about $812 a year — against a local electricity rate of 19.06¢/kWh. 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 $7,321 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Not every home in Bourbonnais has gas service. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. Switching saves about $1,574 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.
How Bourbonnais compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Bourbonnais comes in at 683 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2088 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Deciding what's next in Bourbonnais, IL
About 18,083 people live in Bourbonnais, 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.
More on how this number was built
Every constant behind this page — the 2.63 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Bourbonnais's -3.1°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.