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

January 18, 2016

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 no more!

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.” Yes, that’s really the title.

For complete instructions, see Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were recently updated to software version 5.1.3 or later may have some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the glitch and get it up and running again.

Signs of this glitch 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 turn itself off
the thermostat’s animations 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 heating and cooling system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is on but you can’t control it or it’s 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 cord plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

IMPORTANT: Do not try to power on or off your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t elaborate why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.)

After about 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the component has turned on while charging, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completed the restart, 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 be ready to go 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 showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 352-414-4006 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 could be functioning as it's meant to. You may need to call Service Experts as one of Gainesville's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Additionally, do not let this experience worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you daily. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, which typically results in payback within the first year. 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 top investments in your home that you can make.

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