Methods and systems may provide for identifying, and distinguishing between electrical loads using time and frequency domain analysis of at least one property of an alternating current during a transient event. In one example, time and frequency domain features may be computed from the voltage signatures of an ON event. A support vector machine classifier may then be trained using the feature vectors (including the time and frequency domain features) for known devices. The trained support vector machine may classify or identify an unknown electrical device using a feature vector as input.