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 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 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 information, please visit their Nest Support page. For a quick summary, keep on reading:

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

Indications of this glitch include the following:

the thermostat being offline in the Nest’s mobile app and disconnected from the Wi-Fi
the thermostat tells you the battery is low and it needs to shut itself down
the thermostat’s animated properties 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 system(s)

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

IMPORTANT: 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, DON’T.)

After approximately 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to fully charge. After another hour of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and reattach it to its base.

You should be ready to rock at this point, but if you've had enough and want to switch your thermostat, you can view 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 Coastal Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please give us a call at 912-208-2399 or schedule an appointment online.

And if you've got another issue, such as a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat could be functioning as it's meant to. You may need to call Coastal Service Experts as one of Savannah's premier furnace experts to fix your system.

Finally, do not let this situation worry you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly using Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you every day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adapts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 prime investments in your home that you can make.

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