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 issues 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 an instructional 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, please visit their Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were recently updated to software version 5.1.3 or later may be having problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the glitch and get it up and working 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 notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to turn off
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 black and unresponsive (you may also see a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s 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 restart 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 about 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be be ready to go at this point, but if you're done with Nest and want to switch your thermostat, you can read our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have gone through both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning set up your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 954-736-4314 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 may not be the problem at all. You may need to call Service Experts as one of Fort Lauderdale's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Finally, do not let this situation scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you every day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies 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 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.

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