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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you probably heard about the recent outages and may be living in fear of being left without heat in the dead of winter.

We are here to calm your fears!

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.” Yes, that’s really the title.

For additional information, see their Nest Support page. For a quick 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 have some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the issue and get it up and going again.

Symptoms of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to turn itself off
the thermostat’s animated properties 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 black 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 performing 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall 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 roughly 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on during this time, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to complete charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but you can't get it to work and want to change your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some backup. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 440-252-1375 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another problem, such as 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 Service Experts as one of Cleveland's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Finally, do not let this situation worry 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 top investments in your home that you can make.

Back to blog