On our most recent IoT Podcast, Justin called in with a question about devices connected to both Home Assistant and Amazon. He’s looking for a way to remove a bunch of old smart home devices all at once: They’re no longer on his network but are still appearing in either the Amazon app or Home Assistant. There’s an easy way to accomplish this, but unfortunately, it doesn’t always work. So we’re adding two additional options to remove phantom smart home devices from Home Assistant.
The first and easiest method is open the Amazon Alexa mobile app and click the Devices option, followed by All Devices. Then you can tap a device, click the Settings option, and choose the Delete action. In theory, that should remove the device connection with Amazon, which in turn should remove it from Home Assistant as well.
Note that you can accomplish the same thing more quickly by browsing to alexa.amazon.com, signing in, and clicking the Smart Home menu option. You’ll see a much cleaner interface that responds faster than the mobile app.
Unfortunately, this process isn’t as reliable as it should be. That’s based on experience from users in various Home Assistant forums.
If you remove the devices from Amazon and they still appear in Home Assistant, you can select them in your Home Assistant dashboard and try to delete them manually. But even this can be hit or miss at times.
However, Home Assistant keeps a text-based file of all discovered devices. And it’s here that you can make these phantom devices disappear like Houdini. First, however, you’ll want to make a backup of this file, which can be found at ‘/config/.storage/core.entity_registry’.
Here you’ll look for the device entries you want to excise and simply delete their records from the text file.
You can do this manually, or if you’re feeling adventurous, use this command line as a template: It will query for devices on a single platform and remove them. If you’d rather use the command line for a single device, this one, shown below, will backup your device registry and create a new one without the device you specify.
Personally, if you’re not familiar with the Home Assistant CLI, or command-line interface, I’d probably just manually delete device entities after making a backup.
To hear Justin’s question, along with our discussion in full on the topic, tune in to the IoT Podcast below: