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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you probably heard about the recent issues and may be living in fear of being left without heat 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.” Could you crack that code?

For more detailed instructions, see 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 efficiently charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the glitch and get it up and running again.

Symptoms of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat not working in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to shut down
the thermostat’s animated features 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 observe a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is on but you can’t control it or it’s 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.

IMPORTANT: Do not try to manually restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t elaborate why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.)

After about 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. 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 completed the restart, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be good to go at this point, but you can't get it to work and want to switch your thermostat, you can view 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 experts. Enter us! If Comfort Masters Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 847-250-6729 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another problem, such as a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Comfort Masters as one of Wheeling's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Also, do not let this incident concern you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings daily, 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.

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