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

January 18, 2016

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

We are here to calm your fears!

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.” Yes, that’s really the title.

For more detailed instructions, see their Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, 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 correctly charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the glitch and get it up and running again.

Indications of this glitch include the following:

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

After around 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, power 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, detach the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but if you're done with Nest and want to switch your thermostat, you can read our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have gone through 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 McElroy Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 308-210-4398 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 McElroy as one of Grand Island's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Finally, do not let this situation scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing 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 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.

Back to blog