Just for clarity, I did manually create these entities today but forgot to include a unique ID (why this is incumbent on me I still don’t understand but that is for another day). I spent a long time trying to remove them but in the end gave up and got so frustrated that I restored last nights backup.
Ok, three quick answers. Thanks.
I had an interesting outcome, so taking each in turn…
TL:DR The most unlikely answer was the right one. Which does raise a question for me at least as to why the issue existed in the first place?
I had high hopes for this when I read it. But then I realised, how would recorder still have my entities after restoring a backup? I tried just in case (even the most unlikely suggestions are worth a try, see below) but it wasn’t the answer.
I thought you might be a bit mad suggesting this. Surely the ‘Settings, Entities’ page is dynamic enough not to need to clear the cache? But… drum roll… I did it and they have gone (although it seems they weren’t actually there in the first place )
I have no idea how or why this worked and I’m a bit annoyed now that I probably didn’t need to restore from a backup.
Finally
On the face of it this felt like the most likely solution. They were MQTT but they never actually had any retained messages because I realised that the idea I was trying to implement was never going to work anyway, hence I removed the entities before MQTT knew anything about them
)