EDIT: With mixed feelings I can report that sometime in the last 3 weeks an update to ESPhome (I’m not sure which one) allows me to once again connect to my ESPs. I appreciate all the efforts of the people who work on ESPhome. I only wish whatever is unique about my setup hadn’t failed. (I made no changes at my end).
To celebrate I can finally brew my next twenty gallons of beer, because my critical application for ESP is two fermentation controllers. Cheers.
Original Message:
I’ve been in home automation since long before Home Assistant. When I started with Home Assistant, it still had that “might work, might not” feel to it. Now it’s rock-steady reliable.
ESPHome has gone in the other direction. I’ve had temperature sensors that were absolutely reliable for years. Now, ESPHome can’t talk to them. I don’t want to get into specifics because I’m sure someone will say “That’s an easy problem – all you have to do is …” I’ve done that until I’m sick of it. Now, I just want to go on living my life.
It’s a real disappointment because I have some critical applications that rely on ESPhome. Unfortunately, it appears I have built my house on shifting sands.
If you’re thinking of giving up on ESPhome, just know that you’re not alone.
I don’t - every thing works great since 7(?) years when I fully gave up on Tasmota and ESPeaay finally having a stable and resilient solution with around 100 ESPHome nodes.
Literally everything (critical or not) is esphome powered and all important (critical) stuff is handled directly on the node for that extra resilience (HA restart anyone?)
Please @RichardU keep us updated on your mileage on how you will succeed with your new setup
Thanks for sharing your feedback and would be nice to know a little how you arrived at such situation having myself a bunch of ESPHome that works since years without problems
Fair question. I arrived here by doing nothing except updates to ESPhome and my nodes. And yes, I have followed all of the breaking changes, bought new ESPs, tried different computers, different drivers, cables, power supplies, deleting and reinstalling everything except Home Assistant itself, etc.
The oldest one I have has not been updated for 5 years.
Updating just creates problems.
You can update the ESP-Home builder, but not the nodes. It will do nothing good.
I have 84 yaml files in my ESPHome folder. Most are DIY. Plus, many more in “archival” storage. Of all of the IOT devices around the house, my things running ESPHome are the most reliable.
The smartest thing I did to achieve such stability was to turn off the firmware entity on most of my devices. (If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it).
You didn’t ask for help, but in my experience most ESPHome problems are relatively easy to fix.
Probably not the smartest decision running vulnerable WiFi devices
Discovered and known vulnerabilities should be a good reason to actually update. Would be great if HA would raise an repair issue for known vulnerable devices…
There are quite some other possible causes than esphome. I, too, have over 50 nodes, all working perfectly. Your problems can be from cheap chinese sensors, which do start to cause problems after few years (i’ve had ame problems with them, had to replace them), too long wires, … don’t blaim esphome right away…
I don’t quite agree with you regarding the way esphome has gone… it has gone from good to better over the years…
Where you wanna go? Just don’t say tasmota…
Now, now… we all know what i meant, do we? There are cheap aliexpress chinese fakes and there are double, triple, quadruple priced chinese orignals, correct?
And, yep, sensors do weaken over years, especially humidity part (i’ve hd to change them because they start to show 100% all the time).
I didn’t want to make this a troubleshooting thread because so far that’s been an infinite loop for me. I have tried to test every possible variable including the ESP (several types ordered from Amazon) and I even tried an Apollo sensor which is also unreliable.
I know people on this forum are problem solvers and I appreciate the desire to solve the problem. I’m the same, but when it comes to ESPhome, I’m over it for now.
What I find compelling is that I have several ESPs all of which previously worked find and now none of them can be updated. Unless I’m sitting under a sunspot, it’s hard to imagine that all of my hardware would go bad at the same time. And yes I know there are changes, procedures, etc. While I appreciate all input, blaming my hardware strikes me as an unimpressive argument.
I think I need to give another vote to not updating your ESPHome nodes unless it’s absolutely necessary. So that I don’t get lambasted as putting users in danger for suggesting bad practices I’ll caveat that by saying that “absolutely necessary” could be defined as updating to close a potential security flaw.
But OTOH, I too almost never update my ESPHome devices (I’m running the 2024.7.x version on most and the last I updated before then was 2022.9) and I’ve had very little issues with them. I think the biggest issue I had was also the change to the Dallas sensors recently (2024.7 recently not 2025.3 recently). But I got that straightened out by modifying the yaml and all is good with even those.
My motto where ESPHome is concerned is if it ain’t broke don’t mess with it. Just because an update is available no one says you have to update.
