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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you have probably heard 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 more detailed instructions, please visit their Nest Support page. For a quick 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 effectively charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the problem and get it up and going again.

Signs of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to turn off
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 won’t light up and unresponsive (you may also have a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC 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 cord plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

ATTENTION: 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, DO NOT DO IT.)

After around 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base.

You should be be ready to go at this point, but you can't get it to work 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 showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Bryant Heating & Cooling Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 226-773-3357 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have another problem, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Bryant as one of Windsor's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

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

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