They have one now that looks completely normal too, not their hideous old remote

I would think a grounded box would be much less safe here. In plastic if a wire comes loose there are no repercussions

Fiber can certainly suffer from the exact same issues as copper - a neighborhood or group of homes or town or whatever connects to the Internet over a single piece of cable or logical connection, or a single piece of equipment, and those can become congested.

In theory, that could limit your maximum available bandwidth by limiting everyone’s bandwidth.

But with Fiber, the infrastructure is newer and generally installed with future capacity in mind. Also, fiber is cheap and labour is expensive, so the fiber from your home may continue for some distance before it reaches the first piece of powered equipment, which helps make a physical fiber network more economical, and more redundant.

If your fireplace has a fan then you have power there.

With the model of the fireplace or the module inside, we could tell you in greater detail how it can be switched.

They basically all support a thermostat in addition to a manual switch. Thermostats are frequently in the form of a remote control, with a module that’s just plugged in to spade terminals beneath the fireplace. For a dry contact style fireplace the module is battery operated.

2 4GHz doesn’t generally handle wide channels as well when you have neighbours around like it seems you do, and you already have devices with signal issues. You likely just need a second access point wired to the first (or backhauled on 5GHz)