Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Hazel Crest, IL

Here in Hazel Crest, 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). Running costs here land $278 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Hazel Crest's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Hazel Crest's payback figure

Hazel Crest has a real but manageable winter — 4971 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers add a moderate cooling load, at 864 cooling degree days. -5.3°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -10.7°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.57 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Hazel Crest 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. Source: NOAA station LANSING MUNICIPAL AP, 8.4 miles from Hazel Crest — the closest one on record.

Hazel Crest's running-cost comparison, in dollars

Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 4,898 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,074 a year. Hazel Crest's gas rate of 11.25 per Mcf, applied to the 52 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts its running cost near $796 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 $7,671 behind.

The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with

Plenty of homes in Hazel Crest heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. Switching saves about $1,539 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 5.2 years.

Hazel Crest against the rest of the country

Among 3206 cities, Hazel Crest's winter puts it at rank 780 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2649 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 Hazel Crest

About 13,036 people live in Hazel Crest, 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.

Where Hazel Crest's figure comes from

Every constant behind this page — the 2.57 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Hazel Crest's -5.3°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.