How to Fix Your Nest Thermostat When it Won’t Respond
If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you probably read about the recent issues 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.” Obvious, much?
For more detailed instructions, see 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 have some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the issue and get it up and going again.
Symptoms of this glitch include the following:
- The thermostat being offline in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
- The thermostat tells you 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 have 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 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.
CAUTION: Do not try to 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 around 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to complete charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, disconnect 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 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 giving you trouble, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing installed your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 866-397-3787 or schedule an appointment online.
And if encounter another issue, 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 Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing as one of the U.S.‘s premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.
Finally, do not let this matter scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts 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 problem get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the prime investments in your home that you can make.