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

January 18, 2016

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent problems 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 instructional 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 additional information, go to Nest Support page. For a quick overview, 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 going down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the issue and get it up and working again.

Indications of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being down on 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 animated properties are slower than usual
the thermostat shows a message saying, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;”
the thermostat’s display won’t light up and unresponsive (you may also see a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat will turn 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.

IMPORTANT: Do not try to restart 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 around 10 minutes of charging, unplug 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 fully restarted, plug it back in to complete charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be ready to rock 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 attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some backup. Enter us! If Jack Nelson Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 918-212-8927 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another problem, 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 Jack Nelson as one of Tulsa's premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.

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 every day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 top investments in your home that you can make.

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