Heat Pump Payback in Fairview Heights, IL
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Fairview Heights, IL
Fairview Heights 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 $5,500 more up front here. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $70 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Fairview Heights's numbers say wait.
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The climate behind Fairview Heights's payback figure
Degree days tell the story here: Fairview Heights racks up 3639 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1688 cooling degree days on the cooling side. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is 1.9°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -5.1°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.75 for the recommended cold-climate unit. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Fairview Heights, 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, 8.4 miles out.
The yearly running costs in Fairview Heights
A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 3,351 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $913 a year on electricity. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 38 Mcf a year at $11.25 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $843 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 19.06¢/kWh). With running costs higher every year, there is no payback at any purchase price; over 15 years, against a like-for-like replacement, a household here would end $6,545 behind.
How sensitive Fairview Heights's result is to prices
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Fairview Heights if electricity fell to 16.4¢/kWh (from 19.06¢) or gas rose above $13.09 per Mcf (from $11.25). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Fairview Heights, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
Electric resistance heat in Fairview Heights, compared
Not every home in Fairview Heights has gas service. Against electric-resistance heat, baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance, the case for switching gets stronger here. About $1,260 a year comes back this way, enough that the 7.9-year payback clears the $10,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where Fairview Heights ranks in this dataset
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Fairview Heights comes in at 1717 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 2284 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
Next step if you live in Fairview Heights
About 16,115 people live in Fairview Heights, 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.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Fairview Heights's 2.75 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Fairview Heights'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.