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

January 18, 2016

If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent problems 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 an informative page 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 complete instructions, see their Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were recently updated to software version 5.1.3 or later may have some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the glitch and get it up and going again.

Signs of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat not working in the Nest App and disconnected from 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 notification that says, “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 heating and cooling system(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.

PLEASE NOTE: 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 roughly 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the unit has turned on while plugged in, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base.

You should be good to go at this point, but if you're done with Nest and want to switch your thermostat, you can see our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Golden Seal Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 630-246-2698 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter 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 Golden Seal as one of Saint Charles's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Additionally, do not let this incident scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you every day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings daily, 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 incident 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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