[Shop-talk] Remote electric meter readout

[Doug Braun]

Hello,

I always have electricity bills higher than I expect,
and I've always wanted something that would tell me
how much electricity my house was using at any given
moment.  (Then I could tell if my air compressor or
other shop tools were a significant contributor).

I thought I would have to buy something that had to be
attached to the main power feed to the house,
involving the services of an electrician (and $$$). 
But then
I stumbled across a web site for an interesting
gadget: 

  http://www.save-electricity.ca/ 

This has a battery-powered optical pickup that
attaches to your electric meter and detects the
rotation of the disk inside it.  Then it transmits a
signal to a desktop display that shows the current
power usage and other statistics.  It's $139, which
seems quite reasonable.

Has anyone ever seen or bought one of these?  Has
anyone ever heard of something similar for sale? 
Ideally I'd like a system with a computer interface
that would let me log data, put it on a web page,
etc., etc.

Doug