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 being left without heat in the dead of winter.

But fear no more!

Nest Support has published an instructional 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 more detailed information, please visit 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 have some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the issue and get it up and running again.

Signs of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to shut itself down
the thermostat’s animated features are slower than usual
the thermostat shows a notification that says, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;”
the thermostat’s display is black and unresponsive (you may also see 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 performing slow, try manually restarting it by 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 USB cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

PLEASE READ: 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 about 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the unit has turned on while charging, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to complete charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base.

You should be be ready to go at this point, but if you've had enough and want to change your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 239-908-6991 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 could be functioning as it's meant to. You may need to call Service Experts as one of Fort Myers's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Additionally, do not let this experience panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing 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 modifies your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 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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