Thanks for your input. I'll try and set the pi as the DHCP tonight.
As mentioned, when I tried this before I wound up not being able to set an IP address for any device, whether I used wifi or the ethernet. I followed the steps here in the link below, but when I rebooted my devices to reset the connexion nothing got through, even after rebooting the pihole. Not sure if anyone has any idea why that may have happened or how to avoid it, but I'll see if it's repeatable and report back.
DHCP link: How do I use Pi-hole's built in DHCP server (and why would I want to)?