Reset an Apple Homepod WiFi problem

Just did this today. Found a lot of not-quite-complete info online. I am hoping this helps you resolve this if you're having trouble. 

So here's the starting problem: Homepod has somehow lost internet. I don't know what is going on, it is having serious difficulty playing my local music. I think the actual cause of this is that my ISP-supplied router (a Comcast unit) has flaked out on WIFI. Homepod may have been coalmine canary on this.

Eventually, tho, the iphones were having trouble too. Wired connections are ok, but WIFIs are not. The WIFI broadcast is still alive, but broken--this is why the HP is having trouble. I

 had a second WIFI unit turned on already, was doing some test config for other reasons. So we switched phones to use that. All is good again. That was about a week ago. 

Today it occurred to me that maybe the HomePod had gotten lost in the shuffle, since I hadn't even TRIED to use it for a while. Siri said she had lost internet connection, and "Home" App said something similar. Of course the problem was that HP was configured for the old WIFI, which is still ON but not WORKING. 

So I looked online for how to switch WIFIs on a HomePod. Simple answer: you can't actually do this. Well, in theory you can, but NOT in my situation here. How to fix this? Not as easy as you think.

Solution steps:

1. make sure BlueTooth is turned on on your phone.  I had it off, none of this is going to work without it.
   
2. Tell the "Home" App to forget the HP. Completely forget it. 
3. Do a factory reset on the HP. This means pull the power plug out. Wait 10 seconds. Plug power back in. Touch and hold the top of the HP. Siri is going to tell you it is going to reset and to wait for 3 beeps. 
4. make sure your phone is ON and near the HP, and is logged in on the WIFI SSID you want the HP on; i.e., not the broken CC one I still have. The HP uses your phone, via BlueTooth, to grab settings about logins and whatnot. Essentially the HP is configuring itself to be like your phone. 
1. In actuality that isn't quite what I want, but it's how it works. 
5. You are now configuring the HP from scratch, let it do what it did the first time, etc. Nothing complicated here. 
1. Add the HP in the "Home" App on your phone. 
6. In theory you can play from iphone to HomePod, using "Handoff" but that seems to not work for me. OK, no big deal, it was just a test, not what I actually want. 
7. Any Mac device you have ON THE SAME SUBNET as the HP can see the HP in "Settings->Sounds->Output" and use it as such a device. Because I'm using a new WIFI, it's a new local IP space, and my Mac Pro is upstream and can't see it. 

So I got the old laptop out, got it on the new WIFI ok, it could see the HomePod ok, and itunes can play to it. I want my Mac Pro to play to the HP because that's where all my music is (500GB), so I'm going to have to rejigger this whole network again. I need to do that anyway, and since the CC router has flaked out, I'm going to go ahead and make all that changeover. That will result in a whole new WIFI/wired network setup, new devices, etc, but no big deal that's kinda what I "do for a living" now. 

According to some online reading I did, apparently you can much more easily change the HP WIFI connection IF BOTH ARE ALIVE AND WORKING. Of course that was not my situation, as noted above. 

 I think Siri on HP could do a better job of saying "I'm doing this" or "turn on bluetooth on your phone and hold it close to me". Some pieces of this software suite of iphone and HP and whatever else is running in the background feel unfinished, to me. 

What would ALSO be interesting is if the HP operated via POE, although that's hard to imagine as I expect it wants more raw power than POE is going to provide; there are a lot of flavors of POE, so maybe that's not true. I would prefer that HP be on a wire, tho, but I realize that wireless is the way of things. I'll update this if need be when i do the larger network reconfig.

I'd also like to be able to config the HP via a browser page for the factory reset. I can do this with nearly everything else I have to work with, they have what's called "Management WiFi" which turns on for 15 mins when you power-up the device.

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Later: THIS IS WAY NIFTY. Software updates have made it possible to play straight from my iPhone to the HomePod. So I pushed a bunch more music onto the phone.

Am rejiggering my home network