Why did my device go missing?

Hi
I Have an ESPHome Device I rely on every 3 or 4 months to do measurements when I brew beer. It’s off for most of the time.

Now, when I turned it on, the device appeared as a new one and I did the config from the integrations screen in HA over. Now I’ve got two devices with the same name in the integrations screen. The new one runs the same code and is recoqnized by ESPHome (I can do OTA updates and see the Terminal stuff), but not by HA as the entities do not update. I don’t have a second set of entities for a new device with the same name, just the old set.

Why does HA seem to forget the device just because it is powered off for a while and how do I prevent this from happening?

I don’t know but static ip in both your router and config might help.