Is a heat pump worth it in Palos Heights?
Here in Palos Heights, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Palos Heights would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Unfortunately the electric bill outweighs the gas bill it replaces by about $151 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Palos Heights's numbers say wait.
Why Palos Heights's climate drives this number
Degree days tell the story here: Palos Heights racks up 4543 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1348 cooling degree days on the cooling side. The 99% winter design temperature here — the cold snap equipment must be sized for, not the seasonal average — is 1.9°F, against a record low of -9°F. That puts the seasonal coefficient of performance at 2.75 for the recommended cold-climate unit. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Palos Heights — 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 CHICAGO MIDWAY INTL ARPT, the closest NOAA station, 8.8 miles out.
The month-to-month numbers for Palos Heights
Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 4,183 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,016 a year. That compares with roughly 47 Mcf a year of gas at Palos Heights's 11.25 per-Mcf rate — about $865 a year — against a local electricity rate of 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 $5,767 behind.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Plenty of homes in Palos Heights heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Palos Heights's answer improves. About $1,509 a year comes back this way, enough that the 5.3-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.
Where Palos Heights ranks in this dataset
Among 3206 cities, Palos Heights's winter puts it at rank 1169 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 2800 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
Deciding what's next in Palos Heights, IL
About 12,088 people live in Palos Heights, 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.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
Reading further on this page's numbers
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Palos Heights's 2.75 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Palos Heights's 1.9°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.