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 read about the recent issues and may be living in fear of being left without heat 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.” Obvious, much?

For more detailed instructions, visit 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 may be having problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the glitch and get it up and going again.

Indications of this problem include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to turn off
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 dark and unresponsive (you may also have a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is turned on but you can’t control it or it’s performing slow, try manually restarting it beginning with 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 cord 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 elaborate why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.)

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the component has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to complete charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat and reconnect 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 view 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 experts. Enter us! If Teays Valley Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 304-760-5088 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter 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 Teays Valley as one of Hurricane's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Also, do not let this incident scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you every day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings every day, 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 leading investments in your home that you can make.

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