Thursday, May 10, 2018

Nest Account not connecting to Google Assistant / Google Home

So recently I bought a Google Home Mini and I added my Nest Account easily to it using the Google Assistant App so I could control my Nest Thermostat with voice commands.

Everything was working great, and then one day, it just stopped working. The Google Assistant (through the Google Home Mini) kept saying it couldn't perform the temperature changes.

So in an attempt to fix it, I unlinked my Nest account and tried to re-add it.

However, when I tried to re-add it, here's what happened.

  1. I went to device settings in my Google Assistant.
  2. I tried to add "Nest".
  3. It brought me to a webpage confirming that the Google Assistant would be able to control aspects like temperature.
  4. I clicked "Apply".
  5. I was brought to a page that said "Accounts now linked".
  6. After a few seconds, the Google Assistant app said "Something went wrong. Please try again."

After many retry attempts, here's what finally worked.

  1. I went into the Nest app (but this can also be done at
  2. I went into the thermostat, and then into the thermostat settings.
  3. Under the "About" section, I clicked on "Where" and then "Where" again.
  4. At the time, I had not assigned a room to the thermostat. So I assigned it a room. (remember, this is in the Nest Settings, NOT the Google Assistant Device settings).

After that, I tried re-linking, and everything worked!

So my suspicion, is that at some point, the Google Assistant linking process to Nest requires that the Nest device has a room assigned in the Nest settings. When the Nest device's room is not set, I guess the Google Assistant doesn't know what to do.

A couple of notes on this solution:

1. My Nest is the 1st gen Thermostat.
2. I'm using iOS, so I'm using the iOS Google Assistant and Google Home apps.
3. At some point between originally adding the Nest and successfully re-adding it, I did create and assign my other smart devices to rooms (ie. I assigned my Philips Hue bulbs to a room).
4. The room name that I picked for the Nest in the Nest settings, "Living Room", happened to be a room that I was already using for my Philips Hue bulbs. Not sure if that part matters, but it might.

Alright, that's it. Hope that helps some peeps.