Palos Hills, IL: the heat pump payback math
Here in Palos Hills, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. Against a like-for-like gas furnace and AC swap, going electric costs $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). 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 Hills's numbers say wait.
Why Palos Hills's climate drives this number
Palos Hills has a real but manageable winter — 4543 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, at 1348 cooling degree days. 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. Below the 25°F line where a standard machine starts leaning on resistance backup, Palos Hills sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. These numbers come from CHICAGO MIDWAY INTL ARPT, the closest NOAA station, 7 miles out.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,183 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,016 a year. That compares with roughly 47 Mcf a year of gas at Palos Hills'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.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Palos Hills has gas service. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Palos Hills'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.
How Palos Hills compares nationally
Palos Hills lands at position 1158 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 2098 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
What to do with this number in Palos Hills
About 18,026 people live in Palos Hills, 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.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
More on how this number was built
Every constant behind this page — the 2.75 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. Palos Hills's 1.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.