Wifi devices loose connection with network

Hi all,

I have a few network devices that have been working great for a long time.
But since a few weeks I keep loosing the connection.
I have 2 type of devices, Shelly and Sonoff switches with ESPHome.
The router im using is a Ubiquiti Dream Router. All devices have a static IP.

When looking in my router the connection is excellent.
But in home assistant the shelly devices are disconnected.
In ESPHome they are shown as offline.

If I reset the connection from within my router by recconnecting the devices are online for a bit.

When googling I found this could be an mDNS issue.
But I have no clue where to look.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Battery powered devices might go offline to save the battery.
HA might see this as the device being offline/unavailable, which is sort of correct, but the device comes back when the device wakes up and reinitiate the connection.

None of the devices are battery powered.

ESPHome is not keeping the conenction states up-to-date when not in use, so when switching to the ESPHome page, then give it some time to re-find the devices. This is standard.

Other than that make sure that your network setup do not try to push your IoT devices to 5Ghz, unless they can actually handle that.

Also, to test whether it’s a mdns issue, you could try and give the esp a manual_ip and skip the DHCP process.

Where are you seeing it as offline? Esphome ui or the ha integration?

If the esphome ui, set “Use ping for status”.

As well - have You HA & ESPHome devices in same network segment or routing happens between them ? May be VLAN’s used etc.

Can try Bonjour Browser on Windows PC to see mDNS devices around in network.

If they are 8266 or 8285 esp based devices that were never actually made to handle firmware cpu loads like we put them thru, they tend to get confused and stop responding all on their own. I see this as well. Power reset is about all you can do, or replace them.

YSK unifi can be deceptive. You have to watch the transmission retries and the ap balance.

image

The ss is from an esp. These conditions, though, do not cause problems with my esp’s but it definitely causes a non responsive issue with my pi zero’s. If you’re not in a home where a neighbors wifi/device could be close enough to cause problems, this probably isn’t an issue.

If it is, unifi’s wifiman mobile app will let you scan the wifi channels at the esp. The idea is to choose a less congested one if possible.

Hi guys,

Thanks for all your responses.
I’m definilty not a network expert so it’s helping a lot.

My biggest issue are the shelly devices that become completly unavailable in Home Assistant.
Since the wifi EspHome devices where also shown as offline I assumed there was a bigger networking issue.

I changed the settings to “Ping for status” in EspHome and did did some testing and the EspHome devices all respond normally. Even when they showed offline it all worked and updated fine.
I also looked at the TX Retries and they are all zero so that part also looks fine.

So it looks like there is no problem with EspHome. But my shelly devices are still unavailable and sadly also unusable at the moment.

After rebooting the router the devices are working for a bit but the next day they are offline again.
The shelly devices where my most trustworthy devices for years up untill now.

See bellow a screenshot from my router.