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

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you have 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 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 more basic overview, 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 effectively charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the problem and get it up and working again. 

Indications 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 shut down 
• 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 black and unresponsive (you may also see a blinking red or green light above the display) 
• The thermostat can’t control the corresponding heating and cooling system(s) 

If your Nest Thermostat will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s running slow, try manually restarting it by 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 USB cord plugged into a wall charger or a computer. 

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

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the unit has turned on while charging, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, detach 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 swap your thermostat, you can see our comparison of common thermostats.  

If you have attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 866-397-3787 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you’ve got another issue, like 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 Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing as one of the U.S.‘s premier furnace experts to fix your system.  

Finally, do not let this incident worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you every day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts 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 complication get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the best investments in your home that you can make.