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

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you may have read 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. 

We are here to calm your fears! 

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.” Could you crack that code? 

For more detailed instructions, 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 have been having some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the glitch and get it up and working again. 

Signs of this issue include the following: 

• The thermostat being offline in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi 

• The thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to turn itself off 
• The thermostat’s animated properties 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 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 heating and cooling unit(s) 

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

ATTENTION: 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 they say don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.) 

After around 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on during this time, 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 finish charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base. 

You should be ready to rock at this point, but  you can’t get it to work 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 showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 866-397-3787 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you have another issue, such as 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 Service Experts Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing as one of the U.S.‘s premier furnace experts to fix your unit.  

Finally, do not let this issue scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you daily. 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 12 months. 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 leading investments in your home that you can make.