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

January 18, 2016

If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent outages 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 informative page 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, go to Nest Support page. For a quick summary, 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 correctly charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the glitch and get it up and running again.

Signs of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat not working in the Nest App and disconnected from 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 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 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall or a computer.

ATTENTION: 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 roughly 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the component has turned on while charging, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completely 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 be ready to go 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 showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Knochelmann Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 859-905-0834 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you've got 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 Knochelmann as one of Sharonville's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Finally, do not let this experience scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you daily. 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 a 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 leading investments in your home that you can make.

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