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

If you have a 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 an informative page with the very convenient title “What to do if your Nest Thermostat has become slow, unresponsive, or won’t turn on.” Obvious, much? 

For complete instructions, visit Nest Support page. For a more basic overview, 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 have been having some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the issue and get it up and going again. 

Indications of this problem include the following: 

• The thermostat being down on the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the 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 an alert that says, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;” 
• The thermostat’s display won’t light up and unresponsive (you may also observe a blinking red or green light above the display) 
• The thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC unit(s) 

If your Nest Thermostat is turned on but you can’t control it or it’s running slow, try manually restarting it by turning 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 cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer. 

ATTENTION: Do not try to restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t explain why, but if they say don’t do it, DON’T.) 

After about 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to fully charge. After an hour of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base. 

You should be ready to rock at this point, but  you can’t get it to work and want to swap your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.  

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 866-397-3787 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if encounter another issue, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat may not be the problem at all. You may need to call Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing as one of the U.S.‘s premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.  

Additionally, do not let this incident scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is really saving money for you daily. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings every day, 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 problem 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.