Heat Pump Payback in Loves Park, IL
Will a heat pump pay off in Loves Park, IL?
Here in Loves Park, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Swap a failed furnace and AC for a heat pump rather than buying like-for-like, and the extra cost here runs $5,500. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $350 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Loves Park's numbers say wait.
Compare against another city
Landed on Loves Park by mistake, or want to compare it against somewhere else? Search the other 3206 cities below.
Why Loves Park's climate drives this number
5277 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Loves Park has a cold winter that leans hard on heating equipment; the cooling side runs to 898 cooling degree days, where summers add a moderate cooling load. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -11°F here (coldest 2024 reading -16.1°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.44 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, Loves Park sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, Greater Rockford Airport, 11.1 miles from Loves Park.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 5,476 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,190 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 55 Mcf a year at $11.25 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $840 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 $10,744 behind.
How sensitive Loves Park's result is to prices
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Loves Park if electricity fell to 12.2¢/kWh (from 19.06¢) or gas rose above $17.61 per Mcf (from $11.25). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Loves Park, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
Electric resistance heat in Loves Park, compared
Not every home in Loves Park has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Loves Park's answer improves. The saving here runs about $1,579 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 6.3 years.
Loves Park against the rest of the country
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Loves Park comes in at 524 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 1676 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 Loves Park
About 23,636 people live in Loves Park, 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.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Loves Park's 2.44 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Loves Park's -11°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.