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 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 more detailed instructions, please 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 problems, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the glitch and get it up and running again.

Symptoms 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 itself down
the thermostat’s animations 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 have a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is on but you can’t control it or it’s performing 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.

PLEASE NOTE: 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, DON’T.)

After around 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the thermostat has turned on while plugged in, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to complete charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, disconnect 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 read our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Stevenson Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 937-503-7896 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter 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 Stevenson as one of Dayton's premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.

Additionally, do not let this issue concern you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings daily, 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 prime investments in your home that you can make.

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