Heat Pump Payback in Maywood, IL
Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Maywood, IL
Maywood 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. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $240 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Maywood's numbers say wait.
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The climate behind Maywood's payback figure
4837 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Maywood has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1162 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. The 99% winter design temperature here, the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average, is -5.1°F, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -9.9°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.58 for the recommended cold-climate unit. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Maywood sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from Chicago O'Hare International, the closest NOAA station, 7.1 miles out.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 4,747 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,094 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 50 Mcf a year at $11.25 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $854 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 $9,099 behind.
How sensitive Maywood's result is to prices
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Maywood if electricity fell to 13.4¢/kWh (from 19.06¢) or gas rose above $16.01 per Mcf (from $11.25). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Maywood, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Maywood has gas service. Compared with baseboard or electric-furnace resistance heat, the numbers shift in the heat pump’s favor. The saving here runs about $1,528 a year, which recovers the extra $10,000 spent going electric in roughly 6.5 years.
How Maywood compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Maywood's winter puts it at rank 916 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1695 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.
Deciding what's next in Maywood, IL
About 23,364 people live in Maywood, 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
Every constant behind this page, the 2.58 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs, is documented in the methodology guide. Maywood's -5.1°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.