Welcome @kennedykoblin,
You’re asking a very good and widely asked question. The reality is that on and off spikes have to be “found” by Sense, before you can give a name to them. That’s because the on and off spikes have to meet a variety of criteria before they are recognized as unique device. Here’s how to think about the Sense process before Sense allows you to label a transition / spike.
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First Sense has to be able to “see” a transition. With the current native detection, Sense looks for up and down transitions spikes that last less than a second or less. This leaves out charging cycles for most EVs and operating cycles of many types of air conditioners, because the ramps are slower.
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Second, it is helpful if the transitions / spikes have physics “fingerprints”. Most simple things like motors, light bulbs, heating elements and microwave ovens reveal additional evidence about their identity in the relationship between the voltage waveform and the current waveform. Unfortunately more complex electronic devices give a much more scrambled and unreadable “fingerprint”. Sense might see the transition / spike for those devices, but be unable to “file” it in a consistent place. Plus many transitions/spikes coming from electronic devices don’t correspond to on/off, but rather the music getting louder (stereo) or a sudden change in video output (a commercial coming on an LCD TV).
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If the transition / spike has a clean fingerprint that allows it to be filed away, it gets collected by Sense. As Sense collects more and more, Sense tries to find similar fingerprints that are unique. That means it needs to find a bunch that are very similar across all dimensions. They are allowed to vary a little because other things happening in the house can sometimes modify the fingerprints a little. One common problem determining uniqueness, though, is that there can be many fingerprints that are all close, but instead of forming a self-contained cluster, they form a huge band without enough delineation within the band. This can happen when you have multiple similar devices like your scent machines, all with slightly different fingerprints. Sometimes this will prevent Sense from “detecting” a single device out of that band of devices, but sometimes it will instead “detect” that broad band as a single device, resulting in device conflations.
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Finally, Sense must find a matching unique off for every on transition / spike. It’s not useful to only find ons (or offs) - both paired together are needed. Once Sense finds a unique on and off transition / spike pair, as described, it will pop up and ask you to name it.
That may not sound like a very satisfying answer, but it’s the same reason that photography programs that do facial recognition must first recognize something as a face before you can add a meaningful name that the program can apply to other faces it finds.
A longer version with more technical details and pictures here: