Home Assistant Community — Smart Home — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 16:18:49 +0000
Summary
A Home Assistant user migrating devices from Tasmota to ESPHome reports that Home Assistant retains the first entity names it received, even after devices are renamed or repurposed. The user had initially named all devices using device-type plus MAC address for flashing, planning to assign proper names later, and reused some device names for different hardware. As a result, entity names no longer match their devices — for example, a Fritz WLAN repeater appears as the entity "switch.office_printer." The user states that deleting and re-adding the devices did not resolve the mismatch and asks how to reset or rebuild the entity names.
Hi everyone,
I am moving all my devices around because I am switching from tasmota to esphome.
However, I first set all my device’s names solely as device-type+mac so I can flash them and then assign the proper names later. For some devices I used a name and then repurposed them.
This is now a problem because Home Assistant seems to keep the first names it received.
Now I have devices where the entity is named e.g. switch.office_printer but the device is the new fritzwlan-repeater. So device and entity do not match.
How can I reset this? Deleting the device and re-adding it did nothing.
Original article: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/how-to-reset-rebuild-entity-names/1023139 Source: Home Assistant Community