How to remove entities without a unique_id? Where are they?

21

For me, the devices were not in the known_devices.yaml…

I had removed them from the configuration.yaml, and the entities persisted.
Restarting HA in the interface didn’t work… UNTIL I ran “reboot” from the terminal.

After that they were gone.

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23

Thanks- that’s a tool that I didn’t know about.
But my orphan device is not on that list.

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24

I had the same issue after creating an entity with the REST api. I was able to remove this by posting a DELETE event:

curl -X DELETE -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" https://your-homeassistant.example.com/api/states/sensor.example

More about the REST api in the docs, although this delete action is not mentioned there: REST API | Home Assistant Developer Docs

10 Likes
25

This worked for me as well

26

The entities I want to remove dont show up under statistics.

27

I had added a few things in config yaml and when I removed them they would not go away as entity and had no id and so on.

The solution for me was to use addon studio code server and going into known devices yaml and remove them, save and reboot and they were removed.

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28

known_devices.yaml is deprecated and not used anymore so you should be safe with just removing the file (and since there is theory and practice - I would just make a copy just in case :))

29

worked for me, thanks so much!

30

Worked for me!

31

Fantastic, thanks.
Now the trick will be remembering this next time!

32

Doing this on the specific entity, and then shift+refresh in my browser did the trick.

Thanks

33

this work for me, for one of my helper sensors, but the other is still " This entity (‘sensor.eletrtic_off_peak’) does not have a unique ID, therefore its settings cannot be managed from the UI.

what a pain. I will just have to recreate it with a new name and hope in time I am able to delete it

34

Thanks for this! Purge entities in Developer tools and then logging out and back in again worked a charm!

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35

This great, and worked for me! Now someone needs to make a simple add-on that can issue this API call from a simple UI :slight_smile:

36

I found I needed to refresh my browser once I had done that. Clear the cache so to speak.

2 Likes
37

Is there any screen or method to see the unique_id parameter of the entities?

38

I have used SQLite to delete the relevant entries for the states table, and then the states_meta table, then re-booted HA - and the defunct entity was re-created in states_meta with a new ID !

Do I need a wooden stake ?

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39

the entity is being referenced somewhere, keeping it alive in the system.

40

petro - how correct you were! (it was a legitimate tag being recreated by an integration :slight_smile:)

41

Take care. If you don‘t know how to open a SQLite data base in VSCode, you can easily destroy the data base! Installing the Addon of SQLite and SQLite Tools in VSCode, doesn‘t make it foolproof! I opened the .db file thereafter and my database is now corrupt. The restore files seem to be useless in such a situation. Now it seem that I have to start from scratch.

Does anyone have another idea, how to recover the installation?