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

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you have probably heard 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.” Obvious, much? 

For more detailed instructions, see Nest Support page. For a quick 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 efficiently charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the problem and get it up and running again. 

Signs of this problem include the following: 

  • The thermostat not working in the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the Wi-Fi 
  • The thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to shut itself down 
  • The thermostat’s animations are slower than usual 
  • The thermostat shows a notification that says, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;” 
  • The thermostat’s display is black and unresponsive (you may also have a blinking red or green light above the display) 
  • The thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC system(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 cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer. 

ATTENTION: Do not try to restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t go into detail why, but if they say don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.) 

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the component has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After another 60 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base. 

You should be be ready to go at this point, but  if you’re done with Nest and want to change your thermostat, you can see 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 Stevenson Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 614-334-3192 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if encounter another error, such as a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Stevenson Service Experts as one of Columbus‘s premier furnace experts to fix your system.  

Also, do not let this experience scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is really saving money for you every day. When set it up appropriately, 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 problem 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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