Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Rolling Meadows, IL
Here in Rolling Meadows, 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 $228 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Rolling Meadows's numbers say wait.
Why Rolling Meadows's climate drives this number
4991 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Rolling Meadows has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1020 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. -0.9°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -11°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.68 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Rolling Meadows needs the cold-climate class of unit: past a 25°F design temperature a standard heat pump falls back on resistance backup often enough to eat the savings. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, PALWAUKEE MUNICIPAL ARPT, 6.9 miles from Rolling Meadows.
What it actually costs to run, year to year
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. That compares with roughly 52 Mcf a year of gas at Rolling Meadows's 11.25 per-Mcf rate — about $837 a year — against a local electricity rate of 19.06¢/kWh. Priced as a standalone purchase rather than against a like-for-like replacement, equipment payback runs past the 15-year equipment life, for a 15-year net position $6,917 behind.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Plenty of homes in Rolling Meadows heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. 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 Rolling Meadows compares nationally
Among 3206 cities, Rolling Meadows's winter puts it at rank 724 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1671 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.
Next step for 23,732 people in Rolling Meadows
About 23,732 people live in Rolling Meadows, 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 Rolling Meadows's 2.68 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Rolling Meadows's -0.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.