Yes, you can pull off the thermostat and pull the batteries.
The other is ‘ac workout’ that I sometimes move to a different circuit branch to avoid overloading circuit.
This can be a cause of problems like this. Moving a repeater device not only affects its signaling but since it is a mesh network it causes any devices using it as a repeating node to have potential signal problems too.
Can you run a network rediscovery now and see if the symptoms improve? Step 3 in the link below.