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

January 18, 2016

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

But fear no more!

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

Nest Thermostats that were updated recently to software version 5.1.3 or later have been having some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the issue and get it up and going again.

Signs of this problem include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest application and disconnected from the 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 heating and cooling unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is on but you can’t control it or it’s running 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 USB cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

IMPORTANT: Do not try to restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t elaborate why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.)

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on during this time, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be good to go 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 gone through 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 Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 403-279-5760 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have another error, like 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 Calgary's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Also, 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 appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings every day, 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 top investments in your home that you can make.

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