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

January 18, 2016

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you probably read about the recent problems and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities in the dead of winter.

But fear not!

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 more detailed information, see their Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were recently updated to software version 5.1.3 or later have been having some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the problem and get it up and running again.

Indications of this problem 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 animated properties are slower than usual
the thermostat shows a message saying, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;”
the thermostat’s display is dark and unresponsive (you may also have 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 acting sluggish, 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 cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

ATTENTION: Do not try to power on or off your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t explain why, but if they say don’t do it, DON’T.)

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the component has turned on during this time, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base.

You should be good to go at this point, but if you've had enough and want to swap your thermostat, you can read 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 experts. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 587-404-0790 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have another problem, 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 as one of Edmonton's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Finally, do not let this occurrence worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you daily. When set it up appropriately, 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 prime investments in your home that you can make.

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