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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you have probably heard about the recent issues and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities in the dead of winter.

We are here to calm your fears!

Nest Support has published an instructional 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 complete instructions, please visit their 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 issues, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the issue and get it up and running again.

Symptoms of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to turn itself off
the thermostat’s animations 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 have a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding heating and cooling unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is on but you can’t control it or it’s performing 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall 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 explain why, but if they say don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.)

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, unplug 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 thermostat. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but if you're done with Nest 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 reinforcements. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning installed your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at (713) 352-7887 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you've got 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 Houston's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Also, do not let this issue scare 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 properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 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.

Back to blog