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

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you have probably heard about the recent problems and may be living in fear of being left without heat 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 instructions, see Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, 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 correctly charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the glitch and get it up and working again. 

Signs of this glitch include the following: 

  • The thermostat being offline in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi 
  • The thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to shut down 
  • The thermostat’s animated properties 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 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 turned on but you can’t control it or it’s acting sluggish, 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 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 Support 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, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base. 

You should be ready to rock at this point, but  you can’t get it to work and want to swap your thermostat, you can read our comparison of common thermostats.  

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some backup. Enter us! If Stevenson Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 614-334-3192 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you have another problem, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Stevenson Service Experts as one of Columbus‘s premier furnace experts to fix your system.  

Additionally, do not let this situation concern you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is really saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 top investments in your home that you can make. 

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