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

January 18, 2016

If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you probably read about the recent outages and may be living in fear of being left without heat 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.” Yes, that’s really the title.

For more detailed information, see their 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 problems, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the problem and get it up and going again.

Symptoms of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to turn off
the thermostat’s animated features 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 HVAC unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s running slow, 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall or a computer.

PLEASE READ: Do not try to power on or off 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 about 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the component has turned on while plugged in, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

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

If you have attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Sunbeam Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 716-427-6807 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another issue, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Sunbeam as one of Buffalo's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Finally, do not let this experience worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you every day. 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 complication get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the best investments in your home that you can make.

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