Heat Pump Payback in Palos Hills, IL
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 $5,500 more up front here. 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.
Checking a different city
Palos Hills is one of 3206 cities covered here, each run through the same model. Search another below.
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, and the coldest daily reading in the 2024 station record was -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 International Airport, 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 with the old AC included, against a local electricity rate of 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 $7,767 behind.
How sensitive Palos Hills's result is to prices
The heat pump would become the cheaper option in Palos Hills if electricity fell to 14.8¢/kWh (from 19.06¢) or gas rose above $14.44 per Mcf (from $11.25). At today's prices a cheaper quote cannot rescue the gas comparison in Palos Hills, since there is no yearly saving to recover it from.
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 6.6-year payback clears the $10,000 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.