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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you probably heard about the recent issues and may be living in fear of being left without heat in the dead of winter.

But fear no more!

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.” Yes, that’s really the title.

For more detailed instructions, go to their Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were updated recently to software version 5.1.3 or later have been having some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the glitch and get it up and running again.

Symptoms of this issue 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 animated features 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 have 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 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.

IMPORTANT: 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 approximately 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the unit 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, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be good to go at this point, but if you're done with Nest 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 having issues, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning put in your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 305-440-1505 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have 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 as one of Miami's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Also, do not let this incident worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, which typically results in payback within a 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 best investments in your home that you can make.

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