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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you probably heard about the recent issues 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.” Could you crack that code?

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

Nest Thermostats that were recently updated to software version 5.1.3 or later may be having problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the issue and get it up and going again.

Indications of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to shut itself down
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 is black 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 is on but you can’t control it or it’s 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 USB cable plugged into a wall charger 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 go into detail why, but if Nest says don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.)

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

You should be ready to rock at this point, but if you've had enough and want to change your thermostat, you can see 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 some backup. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 540-302-8645 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another issue, such as 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 Roanoke's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Additionally, do not let this situation 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 properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, which typically results in payback within a 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.

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