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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you probably read about the recent problems 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.” Could you crack that code?

For more detailed information, see Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were recently updated to software version 5.1.3 or later may be having problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the issue and get it up and going again.

Signs of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to turn itself off
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 observe 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 performing 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 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 go into detail why, but if Nest says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.)

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the thermostat has turned on while plugged in, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completed the restart, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be good to go at this point, but if you're done with Nest and want to switch your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some backup. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 318-588-8163 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 may not be the problem at all. You may need to call Service Experts as one of Shreveport's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Also, do not let this matter worry 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 properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts 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 prime investments in your home that you can make.

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