On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 10:05:08 +0000, Max Demian wrote:

For some reason they will not let you get the meter onto your
network
and hence be easy to get at on computers and phones. Is this
perhaps a
security issue, or more to do with trying to keep the calculation
of
the money as a black art?

Would you really want your electricity supplier to have access to your
home network?

No but they don't need to have access to your network or you to have
access to the meter. The "meter" just needs to squirt the consumption
data out at regular intervals. As USB is limited to 5 m unless you
start using active cables, the data ought come out of the remote
display box which is far more likely to be within USB range of a PC.
The only communication between the box and PC would be the low level
stuff to establish the USB link. The PC then just listens to the
incoming data stream (XML formated say). In the box any data sent by
the PC isn't connected to anything so is "harmless".

This is how my "Current Cost" useage monitor works (except it sends a
TTL serial data stream but they do a TTL to USB convertor). It sends
live data every few seconds, then every minute or five historical
data, broken into a number of periods. Last 24 hours, last week, last
month I think, I only log the live data and do my own processing.

--
Cheers
Dave.