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

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you have probably read about the recent issues and may be living in fear of being left without heat in the dead of winter. 

But fear no more! 

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 information, go to their Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading: 

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

Signs of this glitch include the following: 

• The thermostat being offline in the Nest’s mobile app 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 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 is dark 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 will turn 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 NOTE: Do not try to restart your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t explain why, but if they say don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.) 

After around 10 minutes of charging, disconnect the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the unit has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to complete charging. After another 60 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base. 

You should be be ready to go at this point, but  if you’ve had enough and want to swap your thermostat, you can view our comparison of common thermostats.  

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in reinforcements. Enter us! If Parker Pearce Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 301-476-4577 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you have another issue, 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 Parker Pearce Service Experts as one of Gaithersburg‘s premier furnace experts to fix your system.  

Also, do not let this matter panic 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 alters 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 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.