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

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you have probably read about the recent outages and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities 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.” Yes, that’s really the title. 

For additional information, go to 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 issues, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the glitch and get it up and running again. 

Indications of this issue include the following: 

• The thermostat being offline in the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the 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 an alert that says, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;” 
• The thermostat’s display is dark and unresponsive (you may also observe 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 cord plugged into a wall charger or a computer. 

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

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. 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 fully restarted, plug it back in to fully charge. After an hour of charging, unhook 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 read our comparison of common thermostats.  

If you have gone through both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If A1 Chesney Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 587-315-5271 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you have another issue, such as 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 A1 Chesney Service Experts as one of Calgary‘s premier furnace experts to fix your system.  

Finally, do not let this occurrence scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you daily. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, which typically results in payback within the first 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 best investments in your home that you can make.