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

If you have a Nest Thermostat you probably 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 not! 

Nest Support has published an instructional page 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 complete instructions, visit 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 effectively charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to fix the glitch and get it up and working again. 

Symptoms of this glitch include the following: 

  • The thermostat not working 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 down 
  • The thermostat’s animated properties 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 won’t light up and unresponsive (you may also have a blinking red or green light above the display) 
  • The thermostat can’t control the corresponding HVAC unit(s) 

If your Nest Thermostat is on but you can’t control it or it’s acting sluggish, 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. 

CAUTION: Do not try to power on or off your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t explain why, but if Nest says don’t do it, DO NOT DO IT.) 

After about 10 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat from the USB cable. If the component has turned on during this time, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has restarted completely, plug it back in to finish charging. After another 60 minutes of charging, detach the Nest Thermostat and restore it to its base. 

You should be ready to rock at this point, but  you can’t get it to work and want to swap 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 giving you trouble, you will need to bring in some backup. Enter us! If Barlow Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 801-436-8985 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you have another error, like a warning from Nest that your furnace is shutting down, then your thermostat is likely working as intended. You may need to call Barlow Service Experts as one of Wasatch Front‘s premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.  

Also, do not let this occurrence concern 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 properly, Nest intelligently learns your lifestyle, then modifies your heating and cooling use to optimize energy savings constantly, 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 incident 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. 

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