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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you may have heard about the recent issues 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.” Obvious, much?

For more detailed information, see their Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, keep on reading:

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

Signs 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 is dark 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 system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is turned on but you can’t control it or it’s acting sluggish, try manually restarting it beginning with 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 NOTE: Do not try to restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t elaborate why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.)

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the thermostat has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completed the restart, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base.

You should be be ready to go at this point, but you can't get it to work 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 reinforcements. Enter us! If Komfort Air Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 704-705-8135 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 could be functioning as it's meant to. You may need to call Komfort Air as one of Charlotte's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Additionally, do not let this incident worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you daily. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts 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 top investments in your home that you can make.

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