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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent problems and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities in the dead of winter.

But fear not!

Nest Support has published a page with step by step instructions 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 information, visit 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 problems, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the problem and get it up and going again.

Signs of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat being down on 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 animated features 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 black 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 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.

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 around 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the thermostat has turned on while plugged in, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but if you're done with Nest and want to change your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have gone through both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Stark Services set up your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 817-668-6689 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 Stark Services as one of Fort Worth's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Finally, do not let this occurrence worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you daily. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies 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 complication 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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