Should Roselle switch to a heat pump?

Roselle is a place where a heat pump genuinely costs more to operate than the alternative. $3,500 is what Roselle 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 $240 a year here, so the extra spend stays unrecovered. There's no spin on that: Roselle's numbers say wait.

Why Roselle's climate drives this number

Roselle has a real but manageable winter — 4837 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, at 1162 cooling degree days. -5.1°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -9.9°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.58 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. Roselle 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. These numbers come from CHICAGO O'HARE INTERNATIONAL, the closest NOAA station, 8 miles out.

The month-to-month numbers for Roselle

Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 4,747 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $1,094 a year. That compares with roughly 50 Mcf a year of gas at Roselle's 11.25 per-Mcf rate — about $854 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 $7,099 behind.

If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas

Not every home in Roselle 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. About $1,528 a year comes back this way, enough that the 5.2-year payback clears the $8,000 premium comfortably within the equipment's life.

Roselle against the rest of the country

Roselle lands at position 917 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 1728 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the coldest third of the dataset, where climate does most of the work behind this figure.

What to do with this number in Roselle

About 22,871 people live in Roselle, 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.

Where Roselle's figure comes from

The methodology guide walks through exactly how Roselle's 2.58 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Roselle's -5.1°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.