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 $3,500 more up front here (already netting out a $2,000 tax credit). 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.

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, against a record low of -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 INTL ARPT, the closest NOAA station, 3.2 miles out.

The month-to-month numbers for 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 (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 $5,767 behind.

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 $8,000 spent up front comes back in about 5.3 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 for 10,761 people 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.