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

If you have a Nest Thermostat you have probably 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.” Could you crack that code? 

For additional information, please visit their Nest Support page. For a quick summary, 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 effectively charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the issue and get it up and going again. 

Indications of this problem include the following: 

• The thermostat being offline in 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 properties 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 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 heating and cooling system(s) 

If your Nest Thermostat will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s performing 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. 

PLEASE READ: 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 Support says don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.) 

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the thermostat has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base. 

You should be ready to rock at this point, but  if you’re done with Nest and want to swap your thermostat, you can see 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 experts. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing installed your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 866-397-3787 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you’ve got another problem, 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 Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing as one of Canada‘s premier furnace experts to fix your system.  

Finally, do not let this experience 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 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 12 months. 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 top investments in your home that you can make.