I have a programmable thermostat. I'm not sure that there is an option to have no heat at all for some of the cycles. Ours is set so that the "off" cycles have the heat set really low. That works great for us, and our heated floor mat didn't really affect our electric bill at all.

I don't have one, but since I just had to look into programmable timer for our new towel warmer, I was curious to see the what kind of timer Suntouch uses and looked on their web site. It looks to me that there is no "off" or "skip" involved. You set 4 times during a day, and then set a temperature you want the floor to be when that time rolls around. So if you set it to 78 degrees at 6 am, it will come on sometime prior to 6:00 in order to bring the temperature up to 78 by 6:00. It will then maintain that 78 temperature until the next program time. So if you leave for work at 8:00, set the second program time to 8:00 and the temperature to something low so it will go off. The third setting would be your start of evening warm-up time and temperature, and the fourth time setting would be your gone-to-bed time and temperature. (I can't tell from their instructions how low the thermostat can be set. And they caution that if you set back very far and then want a major warm up, it may take a long time to re-heat the floor; that's why their four pre-set temperature programs set the bottom "away" temperatures to 70 or even 75 degrees, and suggest an "away" set-back of only 5-7 degrees.)

-- Eric