Heat Pump Payback in Summit, IL
Should Summit switch to a heat pump?
Here in Summit, 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. The heat pump would cost about $151 more a year to run than the furnace it replaces, a premium with no payback. That's Summit's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.
Not the city you meant?
This runs the same numbers for 3206 US cities, not just Summit. Look one up here.
How cold Summit actually gets
4543 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Summit has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 1348 cooling degree days, where summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating. 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, Summit 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, 3.2 miles out.
The yearly running costs in Summit
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. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 47 Mcf a year at $11.25 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $865 a year including the old AC (electricity here runs 19.06¢/kWh). Because the heat pump costs more to run here, the gap only widens with time: $7,767 behind after 15 years compared with replacing the furnace and AC like-for-like.
How sensitive Summit's result is to prices
For the verdict in Summit to flip, electricity would need to drop to about 14.8¢/kWh from 19.06¢, or gas climb past $14.44 per Mcf from $11.25. A utility offering a lower heat pump rate can change this. Until then, no quote price makes a heat pump pay back against gas in Summit; the case for one here rests on comfort, cooling, or replacing electric heat instead.
The other scenario: no gas furnace to begin with
Gas isn't universal in Summit, many houses run on electric heat already. Against electric-resistance heat, baseboard or an electric furnace, both 100% efficient but still just resistance, the case for switching gets stronger here. Switching saves about $1,509 a year here, a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils, so the extra $10,000 spent up front comes back in about 6.6 years.
Summit against the rest of the country
Ranked against the other 3206 cities covered, Summit comes in at 1171 for heating severity, 1 would be the coldest place in the dataset, and 3035 by population, where 1 is largest. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
Next step if you live in Summit
Summit, Illinois is home to about 10,761 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 Summit, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.
Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.
Reading further on this page's numbers
Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Summit's 2.75 seasonal COP and payback figure. Summit's 1.9°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.