How to Fix Your Nest Thermostat When it Won't Respond
January 18, 2016
If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you may have heard about the recent problems and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities in the dead of winter.
But fear not!
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, please visit Nest Support page. For a more basic 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 effectively charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the glitch and get it up and working again.
Indications of this problem include the following:
- the thermostat not working in the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi
- the thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to shut down
- the thermostat’s animated features 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 won’t light up and unresponsive (you may also observe 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 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 USB cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer.
IMPORTANT: 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 Nest says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.)
After roughly 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the thermostat has turned on while plugged in, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completed the restart, plug it back in to reach full charge. After another 60 minutes 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'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 having issues, you will need to bring in some backup. Enter us! If Becht/Givens Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 502-785-8230 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 Becht/Givens as one of Louisville's premier furnace experts to fix your unit.
Also, do not let this matter panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you daily. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 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.
