The Teager-Kaiser energy operator (TKO) belongs to a class of autocorrelators and their linear combination that can track the instantaneous energy of a nonstationary sinusoidal signal source. TKO-based monocomponent AM-FM demodulation algorithms work under the basic assumption that the operator outputs are always positive. In the absence of noise, this is assured for pure sinusoidal inputs and the instantaneous property is also guaranteed. Noise invalidates both of these, particularly under small signal conditions. Post-detection filtering and thresholding are of use to reestablish these at the cost of some time to acquire. Key questions are: (a) how many samples must one use and (b) how much noise power at the detector input can one tolerate. Results of study of the role of delay and the limits imposed by additive Gaussian noise are presented along with the computation of the cumulants and probability density functions of the individual quadratic forms and their ratios.