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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you probably heard 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 not!

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.” Could you crack that code?

For more detailed information, go to their Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were updated at the end of 2015 or beginning of 2016 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 recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the problem and get it up and running again.

Signs of this issue include the following:

the thermostat not working in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to shut 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 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 system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is turned on but you can’t control it or it’s slow, try manually restarting it beginning with 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.

CAUTION: 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, DO NOT DO IT.)

After around 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the component has turned on during this time, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has restarted completely, 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 ready to rock 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 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 Strogen's Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 603-923-4570 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you've got another problem, 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 Strogen's as one of Rochester's premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.

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

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