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

January 18, 2016

If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you have probably heard about the recent problems and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities in the dead of winter.

But fear not!

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, go to their 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 be having problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the problem and get it up and working again.

Signs of this problem 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 shut itself down
the thermostat’s animations 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 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 unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is turned on but you can’t control it or it’s performing 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 cord plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

PLEASE READ: 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 during this time, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be be ready to go at this point, but if you've had enough 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 some experts. Enter us! If Levy & Son Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 469-250-0932 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 Levy & Son as one of Dallas's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Additionally, do not let this experience panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is really saving money for you every day. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts 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 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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