You wake up to a stuffy, runny nose, itchy throat and eyes, and sinus pressure that causes your head to pound. You immediately recognize these symptoms – allergies. While you long to just go back to bed, you have to face the day, knowing all too well the path that lies ahead – you take an allergy pill, make some tea, inhale as much essential oil-infused shower steam as you can, use your sinus rinse, and wait for the allergies to go away.

While you may be familiar with seasonal allergies, if you consistently have allergies all year round, it could have something to do with your heating and air conditioning system.

It’s been a busy year at Experts In Your Home, and it’s hard to believe that 2019 is just around the corner. We offer tips regularly to help you as a homeowner, knowing that these tips may come in handy when you read them or in the future.

We’ve compiled a list of some of our most widely read blog posts throughout the past year, and we hope this helps you keep your home well maintained no matter the season. When it comes to home maintenance, Experts In Your Home knows we’re all better off when we pay attention and keep a close eye on things.

Here are some of our most widely read blog posts over the last year…

So how many miles have you put on your air conditioner in the last year?

Since we don’t log miles on an air conditioning system as we do on a car, this is actually an impossible question to answer. But the bigger point is worth making: just as you put miles on your car every time you drive it, you put “miles” on your air conditioning system every time you use it. And for the same three reasons you take your car into the shop for a tune-up, you should schedule an annual maintenance check – an air conditioning system tune-up – with Experts in Your Home.

A better question, then, would be: Would you remind me again why it’s so important to get my air conditioning system checked before summer?

Even the home heating and cooling technicians at Experts In Your Home would have to agree: the concept of efficiency is much easier to grasp when the subject is cars rather than furnaces.

What accounts for this disparity? Perhaps because we're mindful of how often we have to fill up our cars with gas. And if you've ever traded a big gas guzzler for a smaller, fuel-efficient car, you might have been amazed over how much farther you could travel on one tank.

Your furnace presents a fuzzier set of circumstances, including at what temperature you set your thermostat and whether you alter the setting overnight or for long stretches during the day.

You've come to think of your central air conditioner as a virtual workhorse – humming along and running at a steady pace all summer long to keep you cool.

But if you spot ice on your outdoor air conditioner unit – whether it's spotty and scattered or thick and widespread – there's only one thing to do:

Over the years, homeowners have received some misguided advice about their central air conditioning systems, most often from inexperienced or unscrupulous contractors. Some of this advice can contain just enough logic to make you wonder whether it's accurate.

Just as your system depends on a tune-up, your knowledge might need a “tune up” to set the record straight about this misguided advice – and potentially save you money on your summer electric bills at the same time.

The “bigger is better” theory doesn't apply to a central air conditioning system. In fact, when it comes to all the inefficient, misguided and downright wasteful advice out there, buying an oversized air conditioner is absolutely the worst air conditioning advice of all.

If one room or area of your home often feels too warm or too cool, you probably have what heating and air conditioning experts refer to as an air flow problem. So what exactly is causing this problem? It could be a leaky, blocked or damaged duct. Or the problem could be traced directly to your air conditioner or furnace.

You can determine if your home has an air flow problem by performing the garbage bag air flow test – so named because the goal is to determine how long it takes for a garbage bag to fill with air (or whether it does it all).

If you've said it once, you've probably said it a dozen times about your home: “It was like that when we bought it.” Such are the decisions that we inherit from previous owners and especially the builder of our home. While some decisions are irreversible, some quizzical and even unwise decisions can be easily altered, including a poorly placed thermostat that inihibits your heating and air conditioning system from doing its job.

You don't need to hang a sign on your back declaring that you're an “allergy sufferer” when you're coughing, sneezing and rubbing your red, watery eyes. The people around you already know and may feel at a loss to help ease your symptoms.

When even you cannot pinpoint every mitigating factor, it's no wonder that you're considering what role your heating and air conditioning system plays in the scheme of your allergies. (Experts In Your Home discussed the role of indoor air quality in two recent articles: “How Your Heating System Affects Indoor Air Quality” and “Beyond Your Heating System: Counteract Poor Indoor Air Quality.”)

All things considered, it's no wonder you may ask, “Am I allergic to my heating and air conditioning system?”