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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you may have 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 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.” Obvious, much?

For complete instructions, please visit Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading:

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

Signs of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to shut down
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 is black and unresponsive (you may also see a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding heating and cooling unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat will turn 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall or a computer.

PLEASE READ: Do not try to manually 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, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. 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 completed the restart, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but if you've had enough and want to switch your thermostat, you can see 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 installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 407-329-7661 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you've got another issue, 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 Orlando's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

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