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

If you purchased the 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. 

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 information, visit Nest Support page. For a more basic 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 be having problems, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the problem and get it up and working again. 

Indications of this issue include the following: 

• The thermostat being offline in the Nest application and disconnected from the Wi-Fi 

• The thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to turn itself off 
• 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 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 is turned on but you can’t control it or it’s slow, try manually restarting it beginning with 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 READ: Do not try to restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t elabourate why, but if Nest says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.) 

After about 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the unit has turned on during this time, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to reach full charge. After an hour of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base. 

You should be ready to rock at this point, but  if you’ve had enough and want to swap your thermostat, you can read 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 Winnipeg Supply Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 204-800-0613 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you’ve got another issue, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Winnipeg Supply Service Experts as one of Winnipeg‘s premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.  

Also, do not let this matter worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating Nest, your thermostat is really saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then alters 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 incident 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.