Heat Pump Payback in Lockport, IL
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Lockport, IL
Lockport is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $5,500. Running costs here land $250 a year higher than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Lockport's numbers say wait.
Compare against another city
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Why Lockport's climate drives this number
4951 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Lockport has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1049 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -4°F here (coldest 2024 reading -13°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.6 for the cold-climate class of unit this climate calls for. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Lockport sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, Lewis University Airport, 3 miles from Lockport.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,822 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,090 a year. Lockport's gas rate of $11.25 per Mcf, applied to the 52 Mcf a year the furnace burns, puts the current furnace-and-AC running cost near $839 a year, against 19.06¢ per kWh for electricity. 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 $9,254 behind.
What would change Lockport's answer
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Lockport if electricity fell to 13.3¢/kWh (from 19.06¢) or gas rose above $16.10 per Mcf (from $11.25). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Lockport, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
Electric resistance heat in Lockport, compared
Not every home in Lockport has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Lockport's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,559 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 6.4 years.
How Lockport compares nationally
Lockport lands at position 809 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1483 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). 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 Lockport
About 26,915 people live in Lockport, 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.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
Where Lockport's figure comes from
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Lockport's 2.6 seasonal COP and payback figure. Lockport's -4°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.