1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to obtaining information from a utility meter.
2. Description of the Background
Information from utility meters is required for a number of purposes. For example, owners or operators of large numbers of meters such as gas, electricity or water companies generally keep a database of the number, location, type, age etc of their meters. In the past this information has been acquired by manually reading this information from newly installed and existing meters and manually entering this information into a database. However, the manual writing down of this information and subsequent manual entry into a database leads to a significant number of errors reducing the usefulness of the database. The amount of commodity measured by the meter is also displayed on a meter and collecting this information for billing purposes generally involves a person writing down the reading and later having it entered into a database. This also leads to human errors in the recording and transferring of many numbers.