Should Collinsville switch to a heat pump?

Here in Collinsville, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. 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). The heat pump would cost about $70 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces — a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Collinsville's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Collinsville's payback figure

3639 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Collinsville has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1688 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. 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 -5.1°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.75 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Collinsville — 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 ST LOUIS DOWNTOWN AIRPORT, the closest NOAA station, 10.9 miles out.

Collinsville's running-cost comparison, in dollars

Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 3,351 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $913 a year. Collinsville's gas rate of 11.25 per Mcf, applied to the 38 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $843 a year, against 19.06¢ per kWh for electricity. Looked at as a full purchase rather than an incremental one, payback here is longer than the 15-year equipment life, leaving the 15-year total $4,545 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Plenty of homes in Collinsville heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. About $1,260 a year comes back this way, enough that the 6.3-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.

Collinsville against the rest of the country

Among 3206 cities, Collinsville's winter puts it at rank 1712 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1669 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 23,766 people in Collinsville

About 23,766 people live in Collinsville, 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.

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 Collinsville's 2.75 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a 1.9°F design temperature, Collinsville sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.