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

January 18, 2016

If you purchased the Nest Thermostat you have probably read about the recent outages 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 an informative page with the very convenient title “What to do if your Nest Thermostat has become slow, unresponsive, or won’t turn on.” Could you crack that code?

For complete instructions, see their Nest Support page. For a quick overview, 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 recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the glitch and get it up and working again.

Indications of this issue 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 shut down
the thermostat’s animated features 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 is dark 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 will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s performing 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 USB cord plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

CAUTION: Do not try to restart 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 approximately 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, shut it down and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the thermostat. Once it has fully restarted, plug it back in to complete charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base.

You should be be ready to go at this point, but you can't get it to work and want to change your thermostat, you can view 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 Barlow Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 801-436-8985 or schedule an appointment online.

And if encounter another error, like 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 Barlow as one of the Wasatch Front region's premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.

Finally, do not let this experience panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is actually saving money for you all hours of the day. When set it up properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then adjusts your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings daily, which typically results in payback within 12 months. And, Nest is still one of the only thermostats under $300 on the market that does this. So don’t let one complication get you down. You were smart to invest in a Nest, because a smart thermostat is still one of the top investments in your home that you can make.

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