• Background
• Guide
• Re-adding the device using its IP address
• Questions
• When should you re-add the device?
• What troubles might re-adding cause?

Background

Sometimes, due to firmware updates or other reasons, you may want to re-add a device based on ESHome to HA, which means deleting and then adding it again.

Guide

Re-adding the device using its IP address

The benefit of using this method is that it does not require restarting HA and does not affect other automations. The only additional step is to first note down the device's IP address.

Process Overview

• Find the ESPHome device in HA and access the device's web page. Take note of the IP address.

• Delete this device in HA.

• Add a new ESPHome device. Enter the previously noted address, keeping only the IP part and removing HTTP and other characters.

• The device should now be re-entered in HA.

Questions

When should you re-add the device?

• If the device is not functioning properly, you may want to re-add it.
• If the device's firmware is updated and certain attribute configurations are changed, you may find that the old device information contains many unusable items, indicated by their grayed-out state, which cannot be enabled or used.
• Although you can hide them, you want your HA to be clean and tidy.

What troubles might re-adding cause?

Generally, you won't need to reconfigure automation flows and Lovelace dashboards, as they will match based on name consistency. However, there may be cases where this needs to be done (if the new firmware changes the device naming rules, for example).

In the past, we made a syntax correction to a device name for the 2A firmware (changing "humen" to "human"), which resulted in many people having to re-add their automations.