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

January 18, 2016

If your home has the 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 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.” Obvious, much?

For additional information, see their Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were updated recently to software version 5.1.3 or later have been having some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the glitch and get it up and working again.

Signs of this glitch 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 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 heating and cooling system(s)

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

IMPORTANT: Do not try to power on or off 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, DON’T.)

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the thermostat has turned on while charging, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base.

You should be be ready to go at this point, but you can't get it to work and want to change your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Midway Services set up your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 727-219-2471 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you've got another error, such as a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat could be functioning as it's meant to. You may need to call Midway Services as one of Clearwater's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Also, do not let this matter worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is truly 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 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 problem get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the leading investments in your home that you can make.

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