Heat Pump Payback in Glendale Heights, IL
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Glendale Heights, IL
Glendale Heights is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. $5,500 is what Glendale Heights would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $240 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Glendale Heights's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Not the city you meant?
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Glendale Heights. Look one up here.
Glendale Heights's weather, in the numbers that matter
Glendale Heights has a real but manageable winter, 4837 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base, and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, at 1162 cooling degree days. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is -5.1°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -9.9°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.58 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Glendale Heights sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Source: NOAA station Chicago O'Hare International, 8 miles from Glendale Heights, the closest one on record.
Glendale Heights's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,747 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,094 a year. Glendale Heights's gas rate of $11.25 per Mcf, applied to the 50 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $854 a year, against 19.06¢ per kWh for electricity. Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $9,099 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
What would change Glendale Heights's answer
For the verdict in Glendale Heights to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 13.4¢/kWh from 19.06¢, or gas climb past $16.01 per Mcf from $11.25. A utility offering a lower heat pump rate can change this. Until then, no quote price makes a heat pump pay back against gas in Glendale Heights; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Glendale Heights 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. The saving here runs about $1,528 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 6.5 years.
Where Glendale Heights ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, Glendale Heights's winter puts it at rank 910 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1252 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.
What to do with this number in Glendale Heights
Glendale Heights, Illinois is home to about 32,866 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 Glendale Heights, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Reading further on this page's numbers
Every constant behind this page, the 2.58 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. At a -5.1°F design temperature, Glendale Heights sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.