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

January 18, 2016

If you have a 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.” Obvious, much?

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

Nest Thermostats that were updated at the end of 2015 or beginning of 2016 to software version 5.1.3 or later have been having some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the issue and get it up and working again.

Symptoms of this problem include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest application 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 won’t light up and unresponsive (you may also observe a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding heating and cooling system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s acting sluggish, 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 cord plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

PLEASE NOTE: Do not try to manually 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, DO NOT DO IT.)

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the component has turned on while plugged in, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has completed the restart, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but you can't get it to work and want to switch your thermostat, you can read 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 some experts. Enter us! If Stallion Heating Plumbing Air Conditioning put in your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 215-278-9690 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another problem, 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 Philadelphia'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 utilizing Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you every day. When set it up appropriately, 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 complication get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the best investments in your home that you can make.

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