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

If your home has the 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 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.” Could you crack that code? 

For complete instructions, see their Nest Support page. For a more basic overview, keep on reading: 

Nest Thermostats that were recently updated to software version 5.1.3 or later may have some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently 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 working again. 

Signs of this glitch include the following: 

  • The thermostat not working in the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the Wi-Fi 
  • The thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to turn off 
  • The thermostat’s animations 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 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 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall or a computer. 

IMPORTANT: Do not try to manually 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 approximately 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the unit has turned on while charging, shut it down 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, detach the Nest Thermostat and restore 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 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 reinforcements. Enter us! If Stevenson Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 614-334-3192 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you have another issue, 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 hvac.  

Additionally, do not let this situation worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you every day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts 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 incident 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.