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 $3,500 after a $2,000 federal tax credit. 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.
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 (record low -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 (electricity here runs 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 $8,744 behind.
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 $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5.1 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.