I’d be really surprised if this worked to change the zig be channel, although it might work to improve communication and the zigbee network . Zigbee is not supposed to change the channel just because you take the hub off-line for a while. If it did, every single device would then not be available to the hub when it returned. @slagle has previously said that the V2 hub can change its zigbee channel if you do a complete factory reset, but that’s not just a power off/power on.
The “network rebuild” that the SmartThings hub does after it goes off-line for at least 15 minutes and then returns to power , called a “network heal,” is an instruction to all of the individual end devices to rebuild their own neighbor tables so they know who their physically closest neighbors are. It doesn’t change which devices are attached to the network or what zigbee channel they are using. From a network engineering standpoint, it’s more of a network refresh than a network rebuild.
Also, zigbee home automation doesn’t run on channel 6 at all. Its lowest channel number is 11.
So i’m confused by the statement:
I’ve got a version 1 hub so I had to go to the web interface to check out the status of the zigbee network. Lo and behold it was running on channel 6.
I’m not sure what the OP was looking at, but it doesn’t sound like it was the zigbee channel number for their hub. 6 would be a Wi-Fi channel, not a ZHA channel.
In the graphic below, the blue is Wi-Fi channel 1, the green is Wi-Fi channel 6, the yellow is Wi-Fi channel 11, and the orange peaks are the zigbee channels. So zigbee channel 11 sits right on top of Wi-Fi channel 1, but it is as far away as you can get from Wi-Fi channel 11. So field engineers usually try to put both zigbee and Wi-Fi on “channel 11” understanding that because of the different number schemes these represent two very different parts of the spectrum.
Also, there seems to be a lot of confusion about which channels conflict with which.
If the OP could post a screenshot of what they are looking at when they think they are seeing the zigbee channel for their hub, that might clear up some of the confusion.
Whether it’s hub V1 or hub V2 , it should look like this:
Given the description of what they were seeing, in particular the “channel 6,” my guess would be that they were looking at the utility for their Wi-Fi router, and that the channel they changed was the Wi-Fi channel.
It’s also possible they didn’t change any channels at all, but rather were looking at two different network tools and that just the refresh itself strengthened their zigbee mesh enough to solve the problem. (BTW, i’m also assuming that anywhere that the OP said “the mesh network” they meant the “eeroWi-Fi mesh network” because zigbee on a SmartThings account is also a mesh network. But it’s zigbee mesh, not Wi-Fi mesh.)
As you can see from the FAQs linked to above, it can get very confusing because zigbee and Wi-Fi use completely different numbering schemes. Zigbee channel 14 overlaps both WiFi channel 1 and the sidelobe for Wi-Fi channel 6.
So if you were using a network analyzer provided with the eero system, it might well show interference in Wi-Fi channel 6 but when you looked at the same networks through the SmartThings IDE without making any channel changes at all, it would show the zigbee channel as “14.” That’s because one utility is looking at the frequencies in terms of the Wi-Fi bands and the other is looking at them in terms of the zigbee bands, and although these two physically overlap they use different numbering schemes.
Healing the network might then improve message transmission between the zigbee devices but without changing the actual channel at all.
So either of those scenarios could explain what the OP had seen without conflicting with previous staff descriptions of how SmartThings handles zigbee channel management.
But I may have misunderstood something.