With just two clamp-on current sensors, the Sense Home Energy Monitor takes current and voltage measurements over 1 million times every second. From this incredibly high-resolution data, it derives the electrical signatures of individual devices. In comparison, most "high resolution" smart meters only take measurements every couple of seconds...hardly real time! You can read more about how Sense works in this blog post.
Within the first week of installation, Sense should be able to find some common devices that cycle on and off frequently, like your refrigerator or microwave. Some devices will take longer to identify, until the algorithms have seen enough contextual data to reliably detect them.
There are devices that Sense won't be able to recognize right away, but as more Sense Home Energy Monitors are installed across the US and Canada, our machine learning algorithms will have more data to generate models from, and the device detection capabilities will just keep growing!