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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you have probably read about the recent outages and may be living in fear of being left without 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 more detailed instructions, please visit Nest Support page. For a more basic overview, keep on reading:

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

Signs of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat alerts 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 notification that says, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;”
the thermostat’s display is dark 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 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.

CAUTION: Do not try to power on or off 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 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 fully restarted, plug it back in to complete charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base.

You should be good to go at this point, but if you've had enough and want to swap your thermostat, you can read our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Aramendia Plumbing, Heating and Air put in your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 210-404-4233 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another error, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Aramendia Plumbing as one of San Antonio's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Also, do not let this occurrence worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings every day, 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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