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

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you probably heard about the recent issues and may be living in fear of the dreaded technology glitch that is causing many Nest users to lose 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.” Yes, that’s really the title. 

For complete instructions, please visit their Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, 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 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. 

Indications of this glitch include the following: 

  • The thermostat being down on the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi 
  • The thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to shut itself down 
  • The thermostat’s animated properties are slower than usual 
  • The thermostat shows an alert that says, “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 system(s) 

If your Nest Thermostat is 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 cable 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 go into detail why, but if Nest says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.) 

After around 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on during this time, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to reach full charge. After an hour of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and reconnect 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 switch your thermostat, you can see our comparison of common thermostats.  

If you have gone through both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Stevenson Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 614-334-3192 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you’ve got another error, 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 unit.  

Additionally, do not let this issue worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you every day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts 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 top investments in your home that you can make.