Heat pump vs. gas furnace in Wood River, IL

Here in Wood River, the honest answer is that a heat pump raises your annual running cost. $3,500 is what Wood River 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. Running costs here land $129 a year HIGHER than the furnace it replaces, so that premium is never recovered. There's no spin on that: Wood River's numbers say wait.

The climate behind Wood River's payback figure

Wood River has a real but manageable winter — 4026 heating degree days a year against a 65°F base — and summers are hot enough that cooling matters as much as heating, at 1319 cooling degree days. 1.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of -7.6°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 2.73 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Wood River — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Climate figures trace to the nearest NOAA station, ST LOUIS REGIONAL AIRPORT, 2 miles from Wood River.

The month-to-month numbers for Wood River

A 2000-square-foot house here would pull roughly 3,734 heating kilowatt-hours annually on top of cooling, totalling about $926 a year on electricity. That compares with roughly 42 Mcf a year of gas at Wood River's 11.25 per-Mcf rate — about $798 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 $5,429 behind.

Electric resistance heat in Wood River, compared

Not every home in Wood River 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. Switching saves about $1,343 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 6 years.

How Wood River compares nationally

Among 3206 cities, Wood River's winter puts it at rank 1491 for severity, while its size puts it at rank 3137 for population — 1 in both cases being the extreme. That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.

Deciding what's next in Wood River, IL

About 10,251 people live in Wood River, 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.

Line up a few local HVAC quotes before you decide.

Reading further on this page's numbers

Every constant behind this page — the 2.73 seasonal COP, the degree-day corrections, the equipment costs — is documented in the methodology guide. At a 1.2°F design temperature, Wood River sits in cold-climate territory; the guide to that class of unit explains why.