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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you may have read 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.” Yes, that’s really the title.

For additional information, see their Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were updated recently to software version 5.1.3 or later may have some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the glitch 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 notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to turn off
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 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 is on but you can’t control it or it’s running 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 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, LISTEN TO THEM.)

After around 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on while plugged in, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be good to go at this point, but you can't get it to work and want to change your thermostat, you can see our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have gone through both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Chief/Bauer Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 217-689-2469 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another issue, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Chief/Bauer as one of Champaign's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Additionally, do not let this experience worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you daily. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters 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 problem 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.

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