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

If you have a Nest Thermostat you have probably heard 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 an instructional 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 instructions, go to Nest Support page. For a more basic overview, 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 have some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the problem and get it up and going again. 

Signs of this problem include the following: 

• The thermostat being offline in the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the 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 an alert that says, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;” 
• The thermostat’s display is dark 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 will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s acting sluggish, 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. 

CAUTION: Do not try to manually restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t go into detail why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.) 

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the thermostat has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base. 

You should be ready to rock at this point, but  if you’re done with Nest and want to change your thermostat, you can see our comparison of common thermostats.  

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing installed your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 866-397-3787 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you’ve got another problem, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. 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 occurrence panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you every day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 incident 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.