Sensor Entity is renamed to sensor.outside_humidity_2

I have an ESPHome sensor (BME280) which happily reports outside humidity. I just added a new (completely different device with different name etc) sensor to my setup and for some reason, the entities for my original BME280 sensor are now renamed from:

sensor.outside_humidity to
sensor.outside_humidity_2

I did not touch/update that sensor but now all my dashboards and automation are broken…
Does anyone know how this happens (and how to avoid it)

It happened again this morning… Now the ones which are working are _3 and I had to change everything again. Can someone please give me some guidance on how to avoid this?

The only way this should happen is if you have duplicate entity ids.

You don’t have to re-write all your automations. You can change the entity id in the configuration / entities menu. So change sensor.outside_humidity_2 back to sensor.outside_humidity.

Thanks @tom_l - I’ll check that out as that would be majorly helpful.

Do you know why this is happening though? Is it an ESPHome or Home Assistant issue?

Thanks @tom_l - I don’t specify the entity ID in the ESP Home yaml file at all. I guess I could try doing that to avoid it.

Thanks for the renaming in entity configuration. That worked brilliantly.