Thanks Dave, but thats where my brain gets foggy. For instance I can see how I would put a timer value in the EEPROM, then read it at boot time. But what if the user doesn't want to use the timer at all? Do I have an IF NoTimer then skip the timer section? And then would this get checked every time through the loop? that seems like the wrong way to implement it. But I can't think how to do it.