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

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you may have heard about the recent issues 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 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, see 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 problems, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the issue and get it up and running 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 tells you the battery is low and it needs to shut down 
  • The thermostat’s animated features are slower than usual 
  • The thermostat shows a message saying, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;” 
  • The thermostat’s display is dark 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 is 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 USB cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer. 

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

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the component has turned on while plugged in, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another hour 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 switch your thermostat, you can read 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 some backup. Enter us! If Stallion Heating and Air Conditioning put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 215-259-5850 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you have another problem, 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 Stallion Heating and Air Conditioning as one of Philadelphia‘s premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.  

Also, do not let this situation scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing 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 daily, 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 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.