Will a heat pump pay off in Homewood, IL?

Here in Homewood, 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). Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $278 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Homewood's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Homewood's payback figure

Degree days tell the story here: Homewood racks up 4971 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers add a moderate cooling load, with 864 cooling degree days on the cooling side. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -5.3°F here (record low -10.7°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.57 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Homewood 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 LANSING MUNICIPAL AP, the closest NOAA station, 6.8 miles out.

What it actually costs to run, year to year

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,898 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,074 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 52 Mcf a year of gas at Homewood's 11.25 per-Mcf rate — about $796 a year — against a local electricity rate of 19.06¢/kWh. 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.

Electric resistance heat in Homewood, compared

Plenty of homes in Homewood heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Homewood's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,539 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.2 years.

Homewood against the rest of the country

Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Homewood comes in at 772 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2025 by population, where 1 is largest. 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 Homewood

About 18,789 people live in Homewood, 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.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Homewood's 2.57 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. At a -5.3°F design temperature, Homewood sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.