I purchased an Iotawatt back in late 2024, but only got it installed back in April of this year. It worked great! for about 24 hours. I fiddled with it a bit, pulled the SD card, looked at the logs, but couldn’t get it to consistently connect to the router. So I left it hanging out of the wall and forgot about it for a few months.
I got back to it this weekend and messed around a bit. One of the things I tried was a better power adapter with a shorter cable on the off chance there was interference or something from the long one tangled up right next to the wifi antenna. Suddenly it was communicating with the router again (same room, 10’ away, clear line of sight) It worked great! for about 24 hours.
I did see that it was collecting data the whole time. I have a good 3 months of tracking in there (though Home Assistant won’t import retroactively by itself 
). I just can’t get at it.
Throwing the router logs at Claude it diagnosed a client side DHCP issue:
DHCP client wedge (root-caused via router logs, 2026-08-03/04) — after ~2.5 hours of accelerating DHCP renewals (90min → 45min → 22min → down to every 1 minute), the device stopped sending DHCPREQUEST entirely and looped on DHCPDISCOVER broadcasts once a minute, indefinitely. Router logs confirm it kept responding with a valid DHCPOFFER every time — the device just never completed the handshake. WiFi association never dropped throughout (zero disassociations, hourly WPA rekeys all succeeded), so this is not a radio/AP-side issue — it’s a client-side DHCP state-machine hang in the device’s own firmware. Because it never disassociates from WiFi, the device’s documented self-recovery (“restart if not reconnected within an hour”) never triggers.
I tried power cycling this morning for about 15 seconds before work. It didn’t reconnect to the network. It don’t see any activity from it in the router log since this morning. I suspect if I power cycle it a few more times for more than a few seconds it might come back. I’ve kicked out the DHCP lease so that if/when I do get it talking again it might last a few days rather than one, but that’s a bandaid. I could us a Home Assistant automation to power cycle it repeatedly after it stops updating, but again, that feels like a bad solution.
Is this a firmware issue I can fix with an update? Is it a bad ESP8266 I can fix with a board swap (I have a handful of ESP8266MOD units around, but they’re half the size physically, so probably not a drop in + flash. I’d be fine getting a specific model off Amazon or Mouser)?
Thanks!