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

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent issues and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities in the dead of winter. 

We are here to calm your fears! 

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.” Yes, that’s really the title. 

For additional information, see 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 have been having some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the problem and get it up and working again. 

Symptoms of this problem include the following: 

  • The thermostat not working 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 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 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. 

ATTENTION: Do not try to power on or off your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t explain why, but if Nest says don’t do it, DON’T.) 

After around 10 minutes of charging, unplug 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 system. Once it has completed the restart, plug it back in to complete charging. After an hour of charging, detach 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 showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Stevenson Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 614-334-3192 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you’ve got another problem, such as a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Stevenson Service Experts as one of Columbus‘s premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.  

Finally, do not let this situation worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts 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 problem 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.