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

January 18, 2016

If you purchased 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 no more!

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.” Could you crack that code?

For more detailed instructions, go to 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 may have some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the issue and get it up and working again.

Indications of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to shut down
the thermostat’s animated properties 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 see 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 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 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 they say don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.)

After about 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the unit has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be be ready to go at this point, but you can't get it to work and want to swap 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 D.A. Bennett Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 518-205-3324 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 may not be the problem at all. You may need to call D.A. Bennett as one of Albany's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Finally, do not let this issue panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using 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 alters 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 complication 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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