Nest thermostat has blank screen and blinking red

[ConfusedPotato]

I have two nest thermostats in my home, and they have been operating fine. They have all their smart features turned off, as we had a month of $1270 electrical bills when the thermostat learned to crank the cooling down when the kids came home and just blew up our electrical bill.

They have been operating fine.

One morning I woke up, and discovered that one of the two of them had gotten a blank screen and was flashing red.

I went to the forums and found this issue is extremely widespread.

This is exactly my use case. I am able to take the working thermostat and trade it to the other base and it operates everything just fine.

https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Nest-Thermostats/Nest-thermostat-no-display-Green-blinking-li...

I have reset the device with the 10 second rule multiple times.

I have charged it multiple times including overnight using USB power, which did make the device go from flashing red to flashing green, but otherwise made no other changes and only did that once.

Nothing I have been able to do will allow this device to power on the screen. It remains blank and flashing green, even while my other nest works fine. It has essentially died.

What should I do? We are deeply frustrated, as in addition to our power bills we have also had to replace seven smoke detectors as they took themselves out on the exact anniversary of their 7 years — all of them were still working fine but the firmware expired them without our consent. And now my $270 thermostats is dead. I have never had so many problems with smart devices as I have had with these.

Please advise as to what to do here. I can’t find anything here or on Reddit that gives any substantive advice beyond what I’ve attempted and I’d hate to just brick a perfectly working device because of what appears to be a failed software update.

If  I sound negative please excuse me: I am just deeply, deeply frustrated.

Thank you.

[SoriaD_]

Hello @ConfusedPotato 

Thanks for reaching out to our Nest Community. I understand this situation with your Nest Thermostat power. Let me give you a hand with that.

I appreciate all the efforts made. I'm sorry to hear that the steps we took didn't resolve the inconvenience with the Nest Thermostat. To provide you with a solution, please fill out this form with all the necessary information. My support team will be happy to assist you. Your community thread is #44969346.
 

Once you've completed the form, let me know

Best regards,

Douglas. 

[SoriaD_]

Hello @ConfusedPotato 

We haven't seen your submission form come through yet. Were you able to access it okay? Let us know if you're running into any trouble or still need our help!
 

Keep me posted.

Best regards,

Douglas.

[ConfusedPotato]

We decided to just trash it and replace it with something else for the sake of time and trouble. Thanks though.

Definitely will be using other brands in future — someone with traditional support you can call and talk to.

We’re just writing off the $1600 investment in Google devices because I support has been too much of a pita for the price point. Will also be avoiding Google devices like phones or tablets in future as well. I don’t want to be filling out forms and dealing with community support with a house full of expensive devices — it’s just ridiculous.  Every other company on the planet can handle customer support but Google, and we are done.

We also really didn’t like the way all of our expensive smoke detectors bricked themselves on the exact date of expiration and started making all kinds of noise — I paid for it and we shouldn’t have to replace them until we are good and ready even if it’s a few months past expiration. Seems very anti-consumer. We felt like we were leasing the information (and providing free flats collection) instead of owning what we bought.

Nothing personal but the combination of bureaucratic “support” and the general feeling that we don’t actually own what we bought has made us into non-customers and we’re just tossing everything so we don’t have to continue to deal with it. Hope this feedback reaches someone who can do something with it.

Sorry for the rant, but I wanted to leave a message rather than just ghost the company as I think the feedback is important.

[ConfusedPotato]

Meant “data” not flats.