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

January 18, 2016

If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent outages and may be living in fear of being left without heat in the dead of winter.

But fear no more!

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, please visit their 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 may be having problems, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the issue and get it up and working again.

Symptoms of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being down on 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 animated properties 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 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 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.

IMPORTANT: Do not try to manually 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, DON’T.)

After around 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on while charging, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, detach 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 switch your thermostat, you can see 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 reinforcements. Enter us! If Eveready Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 804-548-4480 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 could be functioning as it's meant to. You may need to call Eveready as one of Richmond's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Additionally, do not let this issue worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you daily. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 incident 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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