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

If your home is running on the Nest Thermostat you probably heard about the recent outages and may be living in fear of being left without heat in the dead of winter. 

We are here to calm your fears! 

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.” Could you crack that code? 

For more detailed instructions, see their 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 correctly charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest suggests 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 being down on 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 down 
• The thermostat’s animations 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 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 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. 

PLEASE READ: Do not try to power on or off your thermostat while it’s still connected to a computer for charging. (They didn’t go into detail why, but if Nest Support says don’t do it, LISTEN TO THEM.) 

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

You should be good 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 attempted both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still showing signs of problems, you will need to bring in some backup. Enter us! If McKinley Heating Service Experts put in your Nest Thermostat, please reach out to us at 780-800-7092 or schedule an appointment online. 

And if you have 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 McKinley Heating Service Experts as one of Edmonton‘s premier furnace experts to fix your hvac.  

Finally, do not let this occurrence panic you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly utilizing Nest, your thermostat is truly saving money for you every day. When set it up properly, 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 complication 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.