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

January 18, 2016

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you may have heard about the recent outages and may be living in fear of the dreaded technology glitch that is causing many Nest users to lose heat 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.” Could you crack that code?

For additional information, please visit Nest Support page. For a quick overview, 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 problems, including becoming unresponsive, not effectively charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the issue and get it up and working again.

Symptoms of this problem 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 animations are slower than usual
the thermostat shows a message saying, “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 unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s acting sluggish, 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 USB cord plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

PLEASE NOTE: Do not try to restart 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, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has fully restarted, 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 be ready to go at this point, but if you've had enough and want to switch your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Neal Harris Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 816-787-0500 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have another problem, 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 Neal Harris as one of Kansas City's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Also, do not let this occurrence concern you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you every day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts 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 top investments in your home that you can make.

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