Get rid of old entity ID's after Shelly's are already deleted

Configuration
1

Recently I deleted a bunch of Shelly’s from the Shelly-integration because the Shelly’s and HASS were moved to a new network with new VLAN’s and subnets, I figured deleting and re-adding the Shelly’s was the easy solution with new subnets and IP-addresses in mind.

When I re-added the first Shelly, the old entity ID’s reappeared, so it seems deleting a Shelly from the integration doesn’t actually delete everything.

After some Googling I found the locked Integration's entities remain in entity registry even after its removal · Issue #22209 · home-assistant/core · GitHub and I’ve already manually tried deleting the orphaned entries (which there were a lot of) from core.device_registry and core.entity_registry (followed by a full restart of the host) but the old ID’s keep popping back up.

Besides doing a clean install of Home Assistant, how can I do a proper cleanup so that the old entity ID’s of deleted devices (in general, not just Shelly’s) are actually gone?

2

Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Entities List.

Using button the top left filter by “Not provided”.

Delete the entities in bulk by selecting them and using the three dots menu.

Screenshot 2026-03-24 at 08-13-23 Entities – Home Assistant
Screenshot 2026-03-24 at 08-13-23 Entities – Home Assistant1854×795 45.6 KB

3

@tom_l I wish it was that simple, none of the Shelly entities of the deleted devices (that can be found in core.device_registry and core.entity_registry ) are shown there.

Did already try manually deleting all entries of a specific Shelly from those files, followed by a restart of the VM with Home Assistant: The old entity ID’s (and names) still popped up upon re-adding that Shelly.

Could it be that home-assistant_v2.db is involved as well with the coming back of entities of deleted devices?

4

I recently had some mqtt entitites I was unable to delete and SPOOK pointed out I still had them in some of my dashboard cards.

Spook does mention such things, eg a hyperlink to the dashboard. Perhaps you’ll give it a try, could be found in HACS.

5

@justone I came across Spook while Googling (forgot to mention that) and it was able to give me a list of those (and a whole bunch of other) orphaned entities, but when it came to the actual deleting: Delete all orphaned entities not working · Issue #827 · frenck/spook · GitHub , no luck there. Did saw a reference to a script on that page to Entity management - Spook 👻 a scary powerful toolbox for Home Assistant. (ctrl+F “Script to remove entities from database”)

alias: Delete orphaned database entities
sequence:
  - action: homeassistant.list_orphaned_database_entities
    response_variable: orphaned
  - action: recorder.purge_entities
    target:
      entity_id: |
        {{ orphaned.entities }}
    data:
      keep_days: 0
mode: single

After running that “List all orphaned database entities” came up empty, but the entities can still be found in core.entity_registry (and trace.saved_traces but that file looks unrelated to the problem) and home-assistant_v2.db. The only thing that seems to have changed in one of the files in config.storage\ is that the orphaned entities list got cleared out, which didn’t solve the problem.

6

When you say this … do they appear within the “entities” section or within the “deleted_entities” section in that file?

If in deleted nothing you must care about.

7

In the deleted_entities section, I already tried manually removing the entries from there (followed by a restart), but HASS seems to be restoring them from somewhere.

Just now I wrote a Bash-script that - based on a list of partial entity names and MAC-addresses (with and without : ) - searches each file in config.storage\ and then deletes the lines that contain a match.

I used a backup copy of the files to test that on, at first glance this crude method seems to work (though a bit slow), but since HASS restored old entitie ID’s and names even after manually deleting lines of a specific Shelly, I’m wondering if there are other locations/files that contain leftover data of entities.

Home-assistant_v2.db sure does, but are there any others?

edit:
@ justone
I just ran my script for a cleanup, did a check if there wasn’t too much deleted (false positive), also deleted Home-assistant_v2.db to start with a clean slate and … still old entity ID’s and names popping up.

edit2: Everything I deleted seems to have been restored in the storage directory and yes I stopped Home Assistant (source /etc/profile.d/homeassistant.sh ; ha core stop) before the editing.

edit3: Huh, instead of issuing the restart command through SSH (like I always do when replacing the Let’s Encrypt certificate) I did this in the VM, now it seems to work?!

8

Restart in HA does a restart. VM does a reboot.

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They’re 2 different things & I’m guessing db changes require a full reboot.

9

@ShadowFist Woops, I meant stop, tried to do ha core stop using SSH, then clean up the files and then ha core start, while after SCP’ing a new Lets Encrypt certificate I always have a script do ha core restart.

It seems “ha core [command]” doesn’t work through SSH? → 'ha core status' runs from interactive ssh but not from ssh commandline