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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you 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 no more!

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.” Yes, that’s really the title.

For more detailed instructions, visit 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 be having problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the issue and get it up and going again.

Symptoms of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to shut itself down
the thermostat’s animations are slower than usual
the thermostat shows an alert that says, “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 slow, 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 USB cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

PLEASE READ: 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 says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.)

After about 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the thermostat has turned on while charging, power 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, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but if you've had enough and want to switch your thermostat, you can read 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 A-PLUS Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 301-747-3140 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another error, 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 A-PLUS as one of Waldorf's premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.

Also, do not let this experience scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you every day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings daily, 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 prime investments in your home that you can make.

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