I am reasonably new to home assistant so please stick with me. I have a pi running home assistant in the house, I added another pi running solar assistant in the garage which connects via Mqtt. So I hooked it up and was running fine.
I then added a sonoff dongle to control some lights, so I configured zigbee 2 Mqtt. I added some smoke detectors and the lights but the lights stopped a day or so later. I moved them onto my hue hub and they’ve been fine. I then added a Tuya outside socket controller. This also kept losing connection. I upgraded my dongle and extended the usb all then seemed ok. So I added a couple more things smartthings multi purpose sensor, zemismart curtain contoller, and a hue motion sensor. Now things start to go a bit strange.
Apart from the things I recognise I now have a Mija door and window sensor, Aqara wireless switch, and a Aqara temperature humidity and pressure sensor. This is on my Mqtt integration. If I look on z2m they are there as well along with some other things floating things. I thought I could have joined a neighbours device by accident so deleted all but my stuff but they just reappeared connected to my network. I assume because they are on my mqtt.
Why have I got these things appearing, I’ve tried deleting however They start reappearing, should I be worried?
MQTT messages from devices can be set as “retain”, that means, as long as there is no change coming in from the device, it stays with its “old” status, in theory “forever”. If the device is deleted, it should normally delete the retaining MQTT message/topic, but sometimes this is not doable or just doesn’t work.
To delete these “dangling” messages and/or topics, you need to use an app like MQTT Explorer. There you can get into each topic or message and delete it.
That unfortunately doesn’t explain why you get these messages in the first place, but that would need to be checked seperately.
No I don’t have it set to true. The devices I don’t recognise seem to be connected to my network as they have a LQI and I can see there states. I have very few devices that I added one at time so didn’t see a neighbours device get added. It was only when I flashed the sonof dongle things have appeared on my zigbee map and mqtt integration (or I’m just thinking that’s when it happened)
I’ve downloaded mqtt explorer, and have connected. I have found 3 of the unknown devices on Zigbee2Mqtt however im then unsure what i should do. Any pointers of where is best to look
There is normally no harm done, if you delete the complete topic for that device. If you accidentally delete an active device, the topic and/or message will be send again from the device. The problem here is only the time - it might take a few minutes to hours, for all devices to send a new message. That depends on what and how often the device sends.
For example, if you delete the temperature message from your thermometer, the state of that entity will stay blank (aka unknown) as long as the thermometer doesn’t send the next temp value. Depending on the thermometer that can be as long as a new temp value is measured. And that can take hours.
If you’re ok with that, you can even accidentally delete “everything”. If the devices are really not there anymore, than it is what you want - deleting the orphaned messages.
Just click on the topic you have indentified, and then on the trash bin in the upper right corner. That’s it!
As I said, there is no harm done, beside that you might miss some data in your history for an accidentally deleted topic.
Many thanks. I understand now, perhaps I had over complicated it in my head. May I ask if I had deleted them in zigbee2mqtt in home assistant, and they keep re appearing. Why would deleting them in explorer be better?
