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 the dreaded technology glitch that is causing many Nest users to lose heat in the dead of winter. 

But fear not! 

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.” Obvious, much? 

For more detailed information, please visit their Nest Support page. For a quick overview, 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 correctly charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the glitch and get it up and running again. 

Indications of this issue include the following: 

  • The thermostat not working in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi 
  • The thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to shut itself down 
  • The thermostat’s animated properties 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 see 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 performing slow, 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 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 explain why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, DON’T.) 

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the unit has turned on while plugged in, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to fully charge. After another 60 minutes of charging, detach 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 tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Stevenson Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 614-334-3192 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you’ve got another issue, such as 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 utilizing Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you daily. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, which typically results in payback within a year. And, Nest is still one of the only thermostats under $300 on the market that does this. So don’t let one problem 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.