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

If you have a Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent problems and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities in the dead of winter. 

We are here to calm your fears! 

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 additional information, go to Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, keep on reading: 

Nest Thermostats that were updated at the end of 2015 or beginning of 2016 to software version 5.1.3 or later may be having problems, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the issue and get it up and going again. 

Indications of this glitch 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 shut itself down 
• The thermostat’s animated properties 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 dark and unresponsive (you may also see 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 running 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 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, LISTEN TO THEM.) 

After about 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After another 60 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base. 

You should be good to go at this point, but  if you’ve had enough and want to change 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 backup. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing installed your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 866-397-3787 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if encounter 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 Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing as one of the U.S.‘s premier furnace experts to fix your system.  

Additionally, do not let this matter concern you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is really saving money for you daily. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters 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 complication get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the leading investments in your home that you can make.