Electricity meter monitoring

[James Fidell <james@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I can find a few web pages discussing monitoring of a "spinning
wheel"
electricity meter and logging to a pc, but they generally seem to be for
(US-style?) meters in clear cases rather than black shrouded ones such
as my own and rely on shining some sort of light through an index hole
in the wheel from above or below, which obviously isn't going to work
for me unless i fancy taking a dremel to the meter case, which I can't
see the electricity-supplier finding too amusing.

Has anyone successfully built something that (say) counts the
revolutions of the wheel using the black mark on the edge and grabbed
the data on a PC?

(My fallback solution is to take the meter tails and divert them through
a second digital meter with a pulsed output, but as I have no way to
disconnect the mains at that point other than by disconnecting the
supplier-side fuses, I'm not desperately keen on that.)

James