Don't Fear the Nest

Published on January 18, 2016

If your home has the Nest Thermostat you may have read about the recent issues and may be living in fear of the dreaded technology glitch that is causing many Nest users to lose heat 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.” Could you crack that code?

For additional information, please visit 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 efficiently charging the battery, or going down completely. Nest suggests recharging and restarting your thermostat to rectify the glitch and get it up and working again.

Signs of this issue 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 itself 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 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 system(s)

If your Nest Thermostat is turned on but you can’t control it or it’s slow, try manually restarting it and turn 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.

ATTENTION: 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, DO NOT DO IT.)

After around 10 minutes of charging, unhook the Nest Thermostat from the USB charger. If the component has turned on during this time, power it off and then turn it back on again, manually restarting the system. Once it has completely restarted, plug it back in to finish charging. After an hour 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 detailed instructions and information, please visit Nest Support.

If you have tried both of these processes and the Nest Thermostat is still giving you trouble, you will need to bring in some experts. Enter us! If Bob Brown Service Experts Heating & Air set up your Nest Thermostat, please feel free to call us at 623-243-4517 or schedule an appointment online. If your Nest Thermostat was not put in by Bob Brown Service Experts Heating & Air , please connect with Nest Support here.

Additionally, do not let this issue scare you about your Nest’s reliability. By owning and properly operating 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 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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