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

January 18, 2016

If you have a Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent issues 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 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.” Obvious, much?

For additional information, go to their 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 says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the glitch and get it up and going again.

Indications 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 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 black and unresponsive (you may also see 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 on but you can’t control it or it’s 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.

PLEASE READ: Do not try to power on or off 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, DO NOT DO IT.)

After roughly 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on during this time, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but if you're done with Nest and want to change your thermostat, you can read our comparison of common thermostats.

If you have attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Epperson Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 843-619-3781 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you have another problem, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Epperson as one of Hilton Head Island's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

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

Back to blog