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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you may have heard about the recent problems 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 an instructional 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 complete instructions, see their Nest Support page. For a more basic overview, 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 correctly charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the problem and get it up and going again.

Indications of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat not working in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat alerts 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 is dark and unresponsive (you may also have 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 slow, try manually restarting it and turn 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall or a computer.

CAUTION: Do not try to power on or off 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 roughly 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the component has turned on while plugged in, 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, unhook the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be be ready 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 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 Finch Air Conditioning & Heating installed your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 281-407-9478 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have another error, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Finch as one of Kingwood's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Finally, do not let this experience scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you daily. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings every day, 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 prime investments in your home that you can make.

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