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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you probably read about the recent problems and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities in the dead of winter.

We are here to calm your fears!

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.” Obvious, much?

For more detailed information, visit Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, 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 issues, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the problem and get it up and going again.

Indications of this problem include the following:

the thermostat being offline 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 animations are slower than usual
the thermostat shows a notification 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 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 USB cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

PLEASE NOTE: Do not try to restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t explain why, but if they say don’t do it, DON’T.)

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes of charging, detach 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 swap your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have gone through both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Gordon's Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 405-432-2197 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 Gordon's as one of Oklahoma City's premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.

Also, do not let this occurrence scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you every day. When set it up correctly, 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 top investments in your home that you can make.

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