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

January 18, 2016

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you have probably heard about the recent issues 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.” Obvious, much?

For additional information, see 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 may have some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the issue and get it up and working again.

Indications 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 itself off
the thermostat’s animated properties are slower than usual
the thermostat shows a notification that says, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;”
the thermostat’s display won’t light up and unresponsive (you may also have a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is turned on but you can’t control it or it’s acting sluggish, try manually restarting it and turn 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, LISTEN TO THEM.)

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on while charging, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be be ready to go at this point, but if you're done with Nest and want to switch your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have attempted 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 Rolf Griffin Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 260-557-1275 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 may not be the problem at all. You may need to call Rolf Griffin as one of Fort Wayne's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Finally, do not let this situation worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings every day, which typically results in payback within 12 months. And, Nest is still one of the only thermostats under $300 on the market that does this. So don’t let one incident 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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