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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you probably 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 a page with step by step instructions 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 additional information, go to Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were recently updated to software version 5.1.3 or later may have some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the issue and get it up and working again.

Symptoms of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to shut down
the thermostat’s animated features 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 HVAC 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.

IMPORTANT: 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 approximately 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the thermostat has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completed the restart, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be good to go at this point, but if you've had enough 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 backup. Enter us! If Wesley Wood Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 484-401-7577 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 Wesley Wood as one of West Chester's premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.

Finally, do not let this occurrence worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings daily, 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 prime investments in your home that you can make.

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