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

January 18, 2016

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you may have 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 informative 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 their 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 issues, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the glitch and get it up and working again.

Signs of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to shut itself down
the thermostat’s animated properties 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 see a blinking red or green light above the display)
the thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC unit(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is on but you can’t control it or it’s running 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.

ATTENTION: 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, DO NOT DO IT.)

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

You should be good to go 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 tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Air Engineers Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 904-450-5672 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have 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 Air Engineers as one of Jacksonville's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Additionally, do not let this experience concern you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is really saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings daily, which typically results in payback within a year. 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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