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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you may have heard about the recent outages and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities 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.” Yes, that’s really the title.

For more detailed instructions, 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 may have some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the glitch and get it up and going again.

Symptoms of this problem include the following:

the thermostat not working in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to shut itself down
the thermostat’s animations are slower than usual
the thermostat shows a notification 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 see a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s running slow, try manually restarting it beginning with 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.

PLEASE READ: Do not try to power on or off 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, DO NOT DO IT.)

After around 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on while charging, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but if you're done with Nest and want to change your thermostat, you can see 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 some experts. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 561-629-1826 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you've got another error, such as 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 West Palm Beach's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Finally, do not let this issue scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you every day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts 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 complication get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the prime investments in your home that you can make.

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