Should Prospect Heights switch to a heat pump?
Here in Prospect Heights, 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 $228 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. That's Prospect Heights's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Prospect Heights's weather, in the numbers that matter
Prospect Heights has a real but manageable winter — 4991 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, at 1020 cooling degree days. Sizing runs off the design temperature, not the average day: -0.9°F here (record low -11°F), which works out to a seasonal COP of 2.68 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, Prospect Heights sits firmly in cold-climate territory, so that's the class of unit priced here. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, PALWAUKEE MUNICIPAL ARPT, 1.7 miles from Prospect Heights.
The month-to-month numbers for Prospect Heights
Electricity use for heating alone comes out to about 4,716 kWh a year on the 2000-square-foot reference house; folding in cooling puts the electric bill near $1,065 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 52 Mcf a year at 11.25 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $837 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 $6,917 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Not every home in Prospect Heights has gas service. Against electric-resistance heat — baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance — the case for switching gets stronger here. The saving here runs about $1,596 a year, which recovers the extra $8,000 spent going electric in roughly 5 years.
How Prospect Heights compares nationally
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Prospect Heights comes in at 730 for heating severity — 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset — and 2339 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.
Next step for 15,566 people in Prospect Heights
Prospect Heights, Illinois is home to about 15,566 people, and the figures above are the same ones a local HVAC contractor uses to size and quote a system — this site doesn't guess where a real quote would land, it just tells you whether it's worth asking for one. In Prospect Heights, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.
Where Prospect Heights's figure comes from
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Prospect Heights's 2.68 seasonal COP and payback figure. At a -0.9°F design temperature, Prospect Heights sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.