Some time ago a feature was introduced, if you delete a device or integration and re-add it afterwards, that entity names and ids are restored.
In my current case, this is exactly not what I want. I want to start with new entity ids and new entity names, defaulted from integration.
I tried a lot of file edits, restarts, … eliminated everything I found (including .storage-files, …). But If I re-add the device, the old entity names and ids still come back.
Another reason is, that the integration changed naming conventions, which makes it hard to submit feedback or problems. And even the reset button is resetting it to old entity id naming conventions. So currently no way to reset to ne official id schema.
But before messing about you may want to know there are changes to entity naming coming in the next release so this may or may not affect any changes you make.
Inside core.entity_registry is 2 sections in data. entities and deleted_entities. When an entity is deleted, the registry entry is moved from entities to deleted_entities and vice versa when things reappear.
Undeleting something old instead of adding new should at least be optional. It kind of negates a common reason why one would normally delete something and add it anew: start fresh.
Well… it was added because of the turmoil that happened when esphome devices were renamed. A common complaint was that when they removed the device it didn’t retain the entity_id’s… So here we are.
That resets the id to how you renamed the device in the UI, not to what the integration would use as a default. So it is not the same. It is more sync than reset.
I think here I directly went from one to another problem and didn’t see that the problem changed most probably in between.
First it was the problem, that the old setting came back.
And then I deleted “deleted entities” and “deleted devices” like Petro suggested above. Before my post of the topic and question here.
And thought, that it is still the case then. But most probably it only looked like that. Because after re-adding now not the old entity names came back, but the new default from custom integration (BMW), which seem to ignore my own device name set via adding the integration, but use a standard derived.
So I ended now with a new device name as chosen during adding the device but in the background entities named like the default name of the device. And then the 2026.3 and .4 ways to reset don’t help anymore, because the default is wrong.
I marked the answer from Petro as solution nevertheless for others, who are searching and only have the first problem.
