ESPhome devices won't work through wifi range extender or Google Mesh

ESPHome
1

As the heading suggests, I have ESPhome flashed devices that won’t work through wifi range extender or Google Mesh.
I flashed them in my office in the basement and they connect directly to the router in the basement and work perfectly.
When I move them to their places around the house, upstairs, they connect to the Google Mesh Wifi and that doesn’t work for ESPhome. I even unplugged the Google Mesh and plugged in a Wifi Range extender in and the devices connect to the extender but don’t work through ESPhome.

When I then plug them in again, back in my office in the basement they work fine.
Very frustrating to as I spent a lot of money for the silly Google Mesh… It’s a larger old concrete and double brick house with bad WIF hence the Google mesh. (The Google Mesh works great! Just that ESPhome doesn’t work through the Google Mesh!)
Any suggestions? Thanks if you can help. Adrian

2

mDNS needs to be able to pass through the range extender / mesh.

3

Hi @tom_l , Thanks for the speedy reply, Just looking through the router and the Google mesh but have not been able to locate any settings or mention of mDNS. The router is set to Bridge Mode but the Google Mesh doesn’t have much in the way of adjustable settings.

4

I had similar issues with TP-Link Deco M4s, which have very little that one can adjust. After hours and hours frustrating attempts, I found out that the guest wifi of Decos works just fine with the ESPHome devices.
All good, just a bit worried that the overall network security might not be that great if any…

5

I must be missing something as any devices on my guest WiFi can only see the gateway, not each other.
I thought this was basic security ?

6

I would start by connecting your ESPhome devices to a laptop via USB/uart, then capturing the logs and posting them here.

If they are converted consumer devices like bulbs, flash up a NodeMCU or similar with ESPHome and use that to test.

7

I use by access points and esphome work flawlessly everywhere.
Have you tried setting manual IP in the esphome WiFi config?
Is the ssid the same on your router as the Google mesh?

8

And another thing this just reminded me of - is all your network configured for 2.4GHz or are your range extenders / mesh only 5GHz?

9

Thanks @samnewman86 @zoogara only 2.4Ghz through out the house. So far I am only using NodeMCU’s. The problem I have found, thanks to your feedback and responses, is that my router is 192.168.0.xx with the Google Mesh connected to the router with same address range of 192.168.0.xx HOWEVER all of the devices that connect to the Google Mesh have an IP connection to the Mesh of 192.168.1.xx so now I am trying to figure out how to reconfigure everything to the same IP range of 192.168.1.xx.
The Google Mesh has little room for adjustment so it looks like I will need to change everything else over to the 192.168.1.xx range. So that’s 38 devices and MQTT etc plus all of the port forwarding etc. plus the router, DNS etc. etc.

I will update you as I go.

10

Ok, understand that Google mesh will act as you main router, as long as you don’t mind double NAT. The reason they are on two different subnets is that you have two routers in the same physical network.

This is how my network is configured, but with Decos rather than Google:

Put your main router in bridge mode, give it some new IP range to save confusion.

Connect your Google Mesh to the router and define it as the default gateway. Give the mesh network IP address range that your devices are configured to.

Your Google Mesh IP address should be configured with the address of your old router.

This is how my Deco mesh is configured, works fine and absolutely no issues with double NAT.

Everything but the Decos connect to the mesh network, only the Deco mesh connects to the router.