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

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent issues 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 instructional 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 more detailed information, visit Nest Support page. For a quick overview, keep on reading: 

Nest Thermostats that were updated recently to software version 5.1.3 or later may be having problems, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the problem and get it up and going again. 

Symptoms of this issue 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 animations 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 heating and cooling unit(s) 

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

ATTENTION: 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 they say don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.) 

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on while charging, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base. 

You should be ready to rock at this point, but  if you’ve had enough 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 having issues, you will need to bring in some backup. Enter us! If Stevenson Service Experts set up 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.  

Also, do not let this situation panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you daily. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 incident 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.