ESPHOME devices appear offline after the ESPHOME update

ESPHome
1

Why do all the ESPHOME devices that are not on the same HomeAssistant network appear offline after the ESPHOME 2026.7 update?
I have installed older ESPHOME version 2026.6 and also with beta 2026.7.0b1 connection and log is ok with that

2 
  manual_ip:
    static_ip: 192.168.210.66

Have you tried using a static IP address?

image
image1452Ă—447 14.1 KB

From the addon section you can change the configuration to use ping instead of mDNS.

3

Online/Offline in ESPHome builder depends on an mDNS response. For example if your device hostname is desklight, then builder pings desklight.local to decide if it’s online or not. There is a way to ping an IP address, but I have never needed it.

Anything that interferes with mDNS will show a device offline.

6

ok now it’s weird, I only see devices online for a while when I’ve just installed a fresh ephome

but now I understand how to still view the log

image
image504Ă—563 19.4 KB

7

I thing i found the problem
ESPHome Device Builder 2026.x floods MQTT esphome/discover topic, causing all online devices to repeatedly publish discovery messages
Description
After upgrading from ESPHome 2025.6.x to ESPHome Device Builder 2026.x, I noticed a significant increase in MQTT traffic.
All online ESPHome devices repeatedly publish messages to:
esphome/discover/<device_name>
The problem disappears immediately when:

ESPHome Device Builder is stopped, or
I downgrade to ESPHome 2025.6.x.

The MQTT broker, devices and network are unchanged. Only the ESPHome version changes.

8

My first thought was “This can’t be right” since the dashboard uses mDNS to determine if a device is online.

According to a source who shall not be named “The repeated MQTT discovery traffic is not normal, and it’s caused by the new Device Builder version, not by the devices themselves.”

I would call that a bug.

9

Where should report this?

10

Since devs never read the user forums, you could try posting an issue on the GitHub page.

11
12

This is a first- an issue on Github gets a response from the developer within a few hours.