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

If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you 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 not! 

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.” Yes, that’s really the title. 

For additional information, please visit their Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, keep on reading: 

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

Signs of this glitch include the following: 

• The thermostat being down on the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the Wi-Fi 

• The thermostat alerts you that 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 won’t light up 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 unit(s) 

If your Nest Thermostat is turned on but you can’t control it or it’s performing 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 cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer. 

PLEASE NOTE: Do not try to manually 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, LISTEN TO THEM.) 

After about 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the thermostat has turned on while charging, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completed the restart, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base. 

You should be ready to rock at this point, but  if you’ve had enough 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 reinforcements. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing set up your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 866-397-3787 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 is likely working as intended. You may need to call Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing as one of the U.S.‘s premier furnace experts to fix your unit.  

Also, do not let this incident worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters 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 incident 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.