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.

We are here to calm your fears!

Nest Support has published an instructional page with the very convenient title “What to do if your Nest Thermostat has become slow, unresponsive, or won’t turn on.” Could you crack that code?

For complete instructions, please visit their Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were updated at the end of 2015 or beginning of 2016 to software version 5.1.3 or later may have some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the issue and get it up and working again.

Signs of this issue include the following:

the thermostat not working in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to shut itself down
the thermostat’s animated properties are slower than usual
the thermostat shows a message saying, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;”
the thermostat’s display is black and unresponsive (you may also see a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding heating and cooling unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat will turn 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 USB cord plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

PLEASE READ: Do not try to manually restart 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, DON’T.)

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, unhook 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 switch your thermostat, you can read our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Falso Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 315-313-6531 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you've got another problem, such as a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Falso as one of East Syracuse's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Finally, do not let this situation panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you every day. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings daily, which typically results in payback within 12 months. 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 leading investments in your home that you can make.

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