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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you probably heard about the recent outages and may be living in fear of being left without heat in the dead of winter.

But fear no more!

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 complete instructions, see Nest Support page. For a quick overview, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were updated recently to software version 5.1.3 or later have been having some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the problem and get it up and working again.

Symptoms of this problem include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest App and disconnected from 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 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 observe a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat will turn 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 USB cord plugged into a wall charger 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 explain why, but if they say don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.)

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on during this time, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, detach 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 change your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have attempted 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 Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning installed your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 919-578-4329 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another error, such as a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat could be functioning as it's meant to. You may need to call Service Experts as one of Raleigh's premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.

Finally, do not let this occurrence panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is really saving money for you daily. When set it up properly, 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 best investments in your home that you can make.

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