Should Evergreen Park switch to a heat pump?

Here in Evergreen Park, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Evergreen Park 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 $151 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Evergreen Park's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Evergreen Park's payback figure

4543 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Evergreen Park has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1348 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 -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. Evergreen Park needs the cold-climate class of unit: past a 25°F design temperature a standard heat pump falls back on resistance backup often enough to eat the savings. These numbers come from CHICAGO MIDWAY INTL ARPT, the closest NOAA station, 5.2 miles out.

The month-to-month numbers for Evergreen Park

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. That compares with roughly 47 Mcf a year of gas at Evergreen Park's 11.25 per-Mcf rate — about $865 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 $5,767 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Evergreen Park, compared

Plenty of homes in Evergreen Park 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. Switching saves about $1,509 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 5.3 years.

Evergreen Park against the rest of the country

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Evergreen Park comes in at 1155 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 1989 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.

Next step for 19,301 people in Evergreen Park

About 19,301 people live in Evergreen Park, 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.

More on how this number was built

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Evergreen Park's 2.75 seasonal COP and payback figure. Evergreen Park'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.