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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you have probably read about the recent outages 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 informative page 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, 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 going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the issue 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 shut itself down
the thermostat’s animated features 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 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 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 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 explain why, but if they say don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.)

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the thermostat has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has fully restarted, 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 you can't get it to work and want to swap your thermostat, you can see our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have tried 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 Robinson Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 847-306-8730 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you've got another error, such as a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat could be functioning as it's meant to. You may need to call Robinson Service Experts as one of Waukegan's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

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