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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you probably read about the recent outages and may be living in fear of being left without 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 more detailed instructions, visit Nest Support page. For a quick overview, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were updated recently 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 rectify the glitch and get it up and running again.

Symptoms of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat notifies you that the battery is low and it needs to turn itself off
the thermostat’s animated properties 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 won’t light up 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 system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is on but you can’t control it or it’s acting sluggish, 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 manually restart 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, DO NOT DO IT.)

After about 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on while plugged in, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to complete charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be good to go at this point, but if you're done with Nest and want to switch your thermostat, you can read our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If A1 Chesney Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 587-315-5271 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you've got another error, 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 A1 Chesney as one of Calgary's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Additionally, do not let this issue concern you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters 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 problem get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the leading investments in your home that you can make.

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