  Several studies have already shown that the transient current can be
successfully used to identify electric loads. However, most of the proposed
methods were validated using only a handful of loads whose electric properties
often differed significantly from each other. Therefore, a much more
challenging empirical study was carried out here using 18 different fixed-speed
motors in a real work environment. A further difficulty was introduced by
normalizing the current amplitude to a value of 1~A during steady state. It is
shown that a classifier can distinguish these 18 motors even under those
conditions with an f1-score of 97.7% after a supervised training period. In
addition to that it was tested whether the mechanical output type (pump, fan or
compressor) of the fixed-speed motors could be inferred using only the
transient current. However, the classification results indicate that this is
not possible.
