Seems like and odd question doesnt it…! Im new, relatively thick at this point…but with crayons and sock puppets a few lads on here have managed to get me through my first hurdle…getting something to go on and off at a certain times…(win on that one as its what on my old system i used to do most of)!
I was running a test system on some temporary hardware while i was waiting for my optiplex to turn up - arrived yesterday - got the basics set up - got one timer set up…when i get home tonight im going to start removing stuff from the old oem hubs…3 of them in total. Rambling on now…my question…all my stuff is Zigbee based and when it “reads something in” for one device i can see 10 different variables like temp, sensors etc etc…so when its on the overview page for one simple on/off adapter the card is huge and just to add i can see lots of possible different places to rename it…so whats safe to remove…do i run the risk of it not working if i delete say - the temp variable?
I would say it’s safe to remove from HA anything you aren’t going to use in your system.
But just to clarify…
with something like zigbee you aren’t actually removing the sensor from the device itself. You are only removing the access to the sensor from HA.
So even if you totally removed everything from HA the device itself would continue to hum along working just fine. But it wouldn’t be sending the data anywhere except the zigbee controller. And the data in the zigbee controller would just sit there unused.
all of those entities are just what the device is sending data on. You can use it or remove it.
Right - ok - its not that i want to delete it completely just some of the components that get loaded in…so on my overview the “cards” i think theyre called are as small as possible so i can get more on screen…
Remove whatever you like from the Lovelace display, it just displays (and allows interaction) with the underlying entities (temperature sensor, light sensor, on/off switch, etc). If you look at the States in the Developer Tools (if you can’t see that menu enable Advanced Mode in your user profile) you can see all the items that HA is actually managing and allowing you to interact with.
If you remove something from Lovelace it affects nothing other than what you see on your dashboard. In the developer menu you can disable entities, which may start limiting what you can manipulate (for instance if you disable a switch entity clearly you won’t be able to toggle a switch, bur if you disable a temperature entity all that means is that you won’t be able to see the temperature value and potentially write an automation that uses it as a trigger).
As previous responder has said, you disabling/removing something in HA will have no impact on the actual physical device or service continuing to do its thing.
You will find at an entity level you won’t be able to remove/delete many entities in any case. For instance, if you attach Hue to your HA instance it will add entities for all your lights and accessories. You can’t delete them from HA, you need to remove them Hue then they will get deleted from HA. You can disable them, which would then hide them from views (you can reenable them in the Settings/Devices menu).
So you have Lovelace (the dashboard) which gets data from the Entities (visible in Developer Tools and loads of other places) which are representations of the physical devices and services that HA is configured to interact with.
As someone else said, you really don’t want to use the default dashboard, it displays everything, which is absolutely not useful when you have hundreds of entities.