Heat Pump Payback in Kewanee, IL
Kewanee, IL: the heat pump payback math
Here in Kewanee, 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 $5,500 more up front here. The heat pump would cost about $289 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces, a premium with no payback. There's no spin on that: Kewanee's numbers say wait.
Not the city you meant?
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Kewanee. Look one up here.
The climate behind Kewanee's payback figure
4978 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Kewanee has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 871 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is -6.7°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -14.4°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.54 for the recommended cold-climate unit. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Kewanee, 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 Marshall County Airport, the closest NOAA station, 31.9 miles out.
Kewanee's running-cost comparison, in dollars
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,963 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,087 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 52 Mcf a year at $11.25 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $798 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 $9,835 behind.
What would change Kewanee's answer
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Kewanee if electricity fell to 12.7¢/kWh (from 19.06¢) or gas rose above $16.82 per Mcf (from $11.25). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Kewanee, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Plenty of homes in Kewanee heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Kewanee's answer improves. Switching saves about $1,530 a year here, a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils, so the extra $10,000 spent up front comes back in about 6.5 years.
How Kewanee compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Kewanee's winter puts it at rank 737 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2790 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 Kewanee
About 12,146 people live in Kewanee, 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
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Kewanee's 2.54 seasonal COP and payback figure. Kewanee's -6.7°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.