How to Fix Your Nest Thermostat When it Won't Respond

January 18, 2016

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you probably read about the recent outages and may be living in fear of the dreaded technology glitch that is causing many Nest users to lose heat in the dead of winter.

But fear not!

Nest Support has published a page with step by step instructions with the very convenient title “What to do if your Nest Thermostat has become slow, unresponsive, or won’t turn on.” Obvious, much?

For more detailed instructions, please visit Nest Support page. For a more basic overview, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were updated recently to software version 5.1.3 or later have been having some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the issue and get it up and running again.

Signs of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to shut down
the thermostat’s animated features are slower than usual
the thermostat shows a message saying, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;”
the thermostat’s display won’t light up and unresponsive (you may also see a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is on but you can’t control it or it’s slow, try manually restarting it and turn the thermostat off and then back on again. If your Nest Thermostat is off and won’t turn on, take the thermostat off the base and charge it using a a USB charger plugged into the wall or a computer.

PLEASE NOTE: Do not try to power on or off your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t go into detail why, but if Nest says don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.)

After around 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the component has turned on while charging, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but if you've had enough and want to swap your thermostat, you can read our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have gone through both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning put in your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 330-269-7235 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have another error, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Service Experts as one of Girard's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Additionally, do not let this matter scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you daily. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings daily, which typically results in payback within a year. And, Nest is still one of the only thermostats under $300 on the market that does this. So don’t let one incident get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the top investments in your home that you can make.

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