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

If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you may have heard 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. 

But fear no more! 

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.” Could you crack that code? 

For more detailed instructions, see 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 have been having some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the glitch and get it up and working again. 

Signs of this problem include the following: 

  • The thermostat being offline in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi 
  • The thermostat alerts 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 is dark and unresponsive (you may also see a blinking red or green light above the display) 
  • The thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC unit(s) 

If your Nest Thermostat will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s acting sluggish, try manually restarting it by 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall or a computer. 

PLEASE NOTE: Do not try to restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t go into detail why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, DON’T.) 

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the thermostat has turned on while charging, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completed the restart, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base. 

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

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Stevenson Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 614-334-3192 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you have 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 Stevenson Service Experts as one of Columbus‘s premier furnace experts to fix your unit.  

Finally, do not let this issue worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is really saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts 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 problem 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.