If you own a Nest smart thermostat, you may be experiencing problems with the battery. Big problems with the battery. As in, the battery keeps draining and leaving you in the literal freezing cold.


A Gizmodo reader told us that his Nest had a software bug that caused his battery to drain—which caused Nest to shut off and leave him with a frigid home. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what you want a smart thermostat to do. Nest has admitted that people are having problems with its batteries.

“We are aware of a low-battery issue impacting some Nest Thermostat owners. In some cases, this may cause the device to respond slowly or become unresponsive,” a Nest spokesperson told Gizmodo. “We are actively investigating the issue and working on a solution. In the meantime, performing a manual restart of the thermostat will help until a fix is put in place.”


These are the instructions for a manual restart:

1. On your Nest Learning Thermostat, press the ring to bring up the main menu. 2. Turn to SETTINGS and press the ring again to select. 3. Turn the ring to RESET and press to select. You can then restart the thermostat or choose which settings you’d like to reset. See the table below for details on what restarting the thermostat or resetting each feature will do.

Not exactly comforting that the best temporarily solution to not having working heat is essentially “turn it off and turn it back on again.”

