Bradley, IL: the heat pump payback math
In Bradley, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. $3,500 is what Bradley 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 $255 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. That's Bradley's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
How cold Bradley actually gets
5005 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Bradley 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. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -3.1°F here (record low -11.2°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.63 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Bradley — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. These numbers come from GREATER KANKAKEE AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 6.4 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Bradley
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 Bradley's 11.25 per-Mcf rate — about $812 a year — against a local electricity rate of 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 $7,321 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Bradley heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Bradley's answer improves. 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.
Bradley against the rest of the country
Among 3206 cities, Bradley's winter puts it at rank 684 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2363 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 Bradley, IL
Bradley, Illinois is home to about 15,298 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 Bradley, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Bradley's 2.63 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Bradley's -3.1°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.