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

January 18, 2016
If you have a Nest Thermostat you probably read about the recent problems 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 informative page with the very convenient title “What to do if your Nest Thermostat has become slow, unresponsive, or won’t turn on.” Obvious, much?

For more detailed instructions, go to their Nest Support page. For a more basic summary, keep on reading:
Nest Thermostats that were recently updated to software version 5.1.3 or later may have some problems, including becoming unresponsive, not correctly charging the battery, or shutting down completely. Nest recommends recharging and restarting your thermostat to resolve the problem and get it up and working again.

Signs of this problem 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 an alert that says, “Please remove the thermostat from its base, then reattach it;”
  • the thermostat’s display is black 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 system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat will turn on but you can’t control it or it’s 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 cable plugged into a wall charger or a computer.

PLEASE READ: Do not try to manually 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, LISTEN TO THEM.)

After about 10 minutes of charging, unplug the Nest Thermostat from the USB cord. If the thermostat has turned on during this time, turn it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the Nest. Once it has completed the restart, plug it back in to complete charging. After about 60 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat and reconnect it to its base.

You should be ready to rock and this point, but again, for more elaborate instructions and information, please see Nest Support.

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 Donelson Air Service Experts installed your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 615-953-9885 or schedule an appointment online. If your Nest Thermostat was not set up by Donelson Air Service Experts, please reach out to Nest Support here.

Additionally, do not let this matter scare 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 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 top investments in your home that you can make.
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