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 read about the recent problems and may be living in fear of being left without heat in the dead of winter.

But fear no more!

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.” 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 have some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the glitch and get it up and running again.

Symptoms of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to turn off
the thermostat’s animations 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 observe a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is turned 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.

PLEASE READ: Do not try to manually restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t elaborate why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, DON’T.)

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on while charging, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes 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 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 showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in some backup. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning installed your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 303-647-5853 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have another error, 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 Denver's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Additionally, do not let this experience scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts 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 complication 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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