There's period of about 10 days every spring and fall where, for up to 30 minutes every day, the sun transits 'behind' a satellite within the beamwidth of the dish and totally overwhelms the signal at the LNB.
But now I realize you're probably talking about an electric heater. Given that their heating elements get so hot that they're putting out visible red/orange light, it seems very plausible that an electric heater could produce enough ~940 nm IR to drown out the signal from the remote.
Thanks for sharing! I will try to keep this in mind when I'm troubleshooting IR remotes in the future.
Btw. that Nokia 6310i from 2002/3 is still used today by mother-in-law, and original battery still holds for 4-5 days!
A transit is when the foreground object doesn’t completely hide the background object.
An occultation is when the foreground object hides the background object.
These two situations are collectively called occlusions.
An occlusion is an eclipse if the the observer falls in a shadow.