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

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. 

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.” Yes, that’s really the title. 

For more detailed information, go to 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 efficiently charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the problem and get it up and going again. 

Indications of this issue include the following: 

• The thermostat not working in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi 

• The thermostat alerts 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 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 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 running slow, 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall 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 they say don’t do it, DON’T.) 

After around 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the unit has turned on during this time, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base. 

You should be be ready to go at this point, but  if you’ve had enough and want to change your thermostat, you can see our comparison of common thermostats.  

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some backup. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 866-397-3787 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you have another problem, 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 Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing as one of the U.S.‘s premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.  

Also, do not let this incident panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you every day. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 prime investments in your home that you can make.