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

If you have a Nest Thermostat you have probably heard about the recent issues 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 no more! 

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.” Obvious, much? 

For more detailed information, see 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 efficiently charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the glitch and get it up and running again. 

Symptoms of this glitch include the following: 

• The thermostat being offline in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi 

• The thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to shut down 
• The thermostat’s animations 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 dark 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 system(s) 

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

IMPORTANT: 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 they say don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.) 

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on during this time, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completed the restart, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base. 

You should be good to go at this point, but  if you’ve had enough and want to switch your thermostat, you can view 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 backup. Enter us! If Roland J. Down Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 518-417-2938 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you’ve got another issue, 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 Roland J. Down Service Experts as one of Albany‘s premier furnace experts to fix your unit.  

Finally, do not let this issue concern you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up properly, 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 best investments in your home that you can make.