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

January 18, 2016

If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you may have heard about the recent problems and may be living in fear of the dreaded technology glitch that is causing many Nest users to lose heat in the dead of winter.

But fear not!

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 additional information, go to 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 efficiently charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the problem and get it up and running again.

Symptoms of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to turn itself off
the thermostat’s animated features are slower than usual
the thermostat shows a message saying, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;”
the thermostat’s display won’t light up and unresponsive (you may also have a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is 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.

IMPORTANT: 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, DON’T.)

After about 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the thermostat has turned on while charging, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat and restore 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 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 give us a call at 901-235-1196 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have 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 as one of Memphis's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Also, do not let this occurrence scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you daily. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, which typically results in payback within 12 months. 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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