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

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent outages and may be living in fear of losing your home’s heating abilities in the dead of winter. 

But fear no more! 

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.” Yes, that’s really the title. 

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

Nest Thermostats that were updated recently to software version 5.1.3 or later have been having some issues, including becoming unresponsive, not efficiently charging the battery, or turning off completely. Nest says to try recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the problem and get it up and going again. 

Indications of this problem include the following: 

• The thermostat being down on the Nest App and disconnected from Wi-Fi 

• The thermostat alerts you that the battery is low and it needs to turn itself off 
• The thermostat’s animations 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 won’t light up 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 system(s) 

If your Nest Thermostat will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s slow, 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. 

CAUTION: Do not try to manually 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 around 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the thermostat has turned on while plugged in, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to fully charge. After an hour of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and reattach 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 view 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 Rob's Albertan Service Experts set up your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 780-800-9047 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if encounter another problem, 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 Rob's Albertan Service Experts as one of Edmonton‘s premier furnace experts to fix your unit.  

Finally, 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 every day. When set it up appropriately, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings every day, 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 best investments in your home that you can make.