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 issues 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.” Could you crack that code?

For more detailed instructions, please visit Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading:

Nest Thermostats that were updated recently to software version 5.1.3 or later have been having some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the issue and get it up and working again.

Symptoms of this issue include the following:

the thermostat being down on the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
the thermostat notifies 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 a message saying, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;”
the thermostat’s display won’t light up 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 acting sluggish, 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 a USB charger plugged into the wall or a computer.

PLEASE NOTE: Do not try to manually restart 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 about 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the unit has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completely 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 you can't get it to work and want to swap your thermostat, you can read our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still having issues, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Winnipeg Supply Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 204-800-0613 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 may not be the problem at all. You may need to call Winnipeg Supply as one of Winnipeg's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.

Also, do not let this matter scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is honestly saving money for you daily. When set it up correctly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings daily, 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 complication get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the leading investments in your home that you can make.

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