Stacey on IoT | Internet of Things news and analysis

Internet of Things

  • Home
  • Analysis
  • Startups
  • How-To
  • News
  • Podcast
  • About
  • Speaking
    • Facebook
    • RSS
    • Twitter
    • YouTube

How to remove phantom Amazon devices from Home Assistant

April 2, 2022 by Kevin C. Tofel Leave a Comment

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.

Home Assistant CLI
This command is removing an old switch; you’ll have to swap your device name for the switch.

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:

 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Featured, How-To Tagged With: alexa, Amazon, connected devices, Home Assistant, smart home

Sponsors



Become a sponsor

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

IoT Podcast

Listen to the latest episode of the Internet of Things Podcast. Just press play!

Sponsors

Become a sponsor







Get Stacey’s free weekly Internet of Things newsletter

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Recent Comments

  • YYTT on So long, and thanks for all the insights
  • Stacey Higginbotham on Matter is now official!
  • Kevin Wirick on Matter is now official!
  • John on Episode 437: Goodbye and good luck

Stacey on Twitter

Tweets by gigastacey
Copyright © 2023 SKT Labs, LLC · Privacy Policy