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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent outages and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities in the dead of winter.

But fear no more!

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 instructions, see Nest Support page. For a quick overview, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were recently updated to software version 5.1.3 or later have been having some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the issue and get it up and running again.

Symptoms of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to turn off
the thermostat’s animations 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 won’t light up and unresponsive (you may also see 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 slow, 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.

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, DO NOT DO IT.)

After about 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the thermostat has turned on while charging, 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, unhook the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be good to go at this point, but you can't get it to work and want to change 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 reinforcements. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning set up your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 303-647-5749 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 is likely working as intended. You may need to call Service Experts as one of Longmont's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Also, do not let this occurrence scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is really saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings every day, 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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