Bought a House with Nest Thermostat and can't use it

[linviss]

I bought a house with an existing Nest thermostat. It was working as basic thermostat (I could manually adjust temperature). The previous home owners did not release it and I they are not responding to my requests to release it. I did a factory reset. Now I get a message that says "Continue setup in the Home App". When I try to connect to the thermostat in the home app it cannot find the thermostat. What do I do?

[Patrick_Caezza]

@linviss 

I'm going to escalate this to the Product Specialist for you

[Markjosephp]

Hello everyone,

I appreciate you looking into this and escalating it, @Patrick_Caezza.

@linviss, give props to the steps you have taken! I understand that having the thermostat set up shouldn't be this tricky. Let's jump in and get it up and running.

Going over these steps might help:

1. Pull the thermostat display from its base.
2. Remove the batteries for at least 2 minutes before plugging them back in to refresh.
3. Put the display back into its base and make sure it'll click into place.
4. Wait for a few seconds until it's ready with the same message shown on its screen.
5. Open the Google Home app and create a new home structure.
6. Proceed by adding the thermostat to the app.

Keep me posted if that works.

Regards,
Mark