Automating the meter reading process

My pre-occupation to date has been with monitoring and saving the energy used for heating. The reason for this is that I want a comfortable house to live in but at the same time relaxed in the knowledge that no energy is being wasted. As I've found it's not easy to identify where the heat energy is going. I'm leaving electricity monitoring until later because I consider this to be more straight forward and a lot about the self discipline of switching things off. And because it's winter it's much worse to be cold than, say, in darkness!

I've made considerable progress in demonstrating that a lot of valuable information can be extracted from some simple measurements. Information that can be used to make informed decisions to invest hard won earnings. However, the problem I'm now experiencing is that my manual observations are too labour intensive and contain inaccuracies. I now need to automate the process so that they reflect changes such as the boiler controller being manually overridden  or the room thermostat adjusted.  The graph of gas consumption vs degree days (difference between inside and outside temperature) illustrates this.

In a simple world heat loss is directly proportional to temperature difference and so the graph should be a straight line. In the real world wind makes a difference by creating ventilation losses and lowering the insulation value of the walls. And there's also heat gain from the sun etc.

It certainly looks possible to put a value on these effects and by so doing estimate the value of controlling ventilation losses or applying a wall treatment. (reference to earlier post). The trouble is much of the scatter in the graph is from the reading errors and hence the need for some automated help. I'm hoping that implementing an automated system wont be too difficult because there appear to be a number of expert communities on the internet developing some very promising systems. Here's hoping I can find something affordable and usable!