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

January 18, 2016

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you may have 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.

We are here to calm your fears!

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 more basic overview, 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 going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the glitch and get it up and running again.

Signs of this issue include the following:

the thermostat not working in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to turn itself off
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 unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is turned on but you can’t control it or it’s running 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall or a computer.

PLEASE NOTE: Do not try to power on or off your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t elaborate why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.)

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and restore 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 gone through both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Calverley Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 817-380-5647 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 Calverley as one of Fort Worth's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Also, do not let this matter worry 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 correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies 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 complication 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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