Is a heat pump worth it in Wilmette?

In Wilmette, a heat pump would cost more to run each year than what you have now. 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. That's Wilmette's own climate and rates talking, not a hedge or a caveat.

Wilmette's weather, in the numbers that matter

Degree days tell the story here: Wilmette racks up 4991 heating degree days each year (base 65°F), and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, with 1020 cooling degree days on the cooling side. -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. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Wilmette — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station PALWAUKEE MUNICIPAL ARPT, 9.5 miles from Wilmette — the closest one on record.

Wilmette's running-cost comparison, in dollars

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 4,716 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $1,065 a year on electricity. 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). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to beyond the 15-year equipment life; over 15 years the net position sits $6,917 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Wilmette, compared

Plenty of homes in Wilmette 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 Wilmette compares nationally

Among 3206 cities, Wilmette's winter puts it at rank 721 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 1459 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.

What to do with this number in Wilmette

Wilmette, Illinois is home to about 27,443 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 Wilmette, nothing is lost by holding off until the current equipment genuinely fails.

Get quotes from local HVAC contractors before deciding.

Where Wilmette's figure comes from

Nothing above is a black box: the methodology guide shows the full arithmetic behind Wilmette's 2.68 seasonal COP and payback figure. Wilmette's -0.9°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.