Manitoba homeowners, businesses worried alarm systems aren’t working

Some Manitobans are questioning if recent changes are causing their home security systems to not work properly. Jeff Keele reports.

Checkups are a daily routine at the Selkirk Veterinary Services clinic, but owner Dr. Birte Klug wonders if anyone’s checking up on them.

Klug has an alarm system in case of break-ins or fires, and as of October 1st, she has a new company overseeing her system, a.p.i Alarm. They purchased the service from Bell, CTV News’s parent company.

But Klug says she hasn’t been able to get in touch with a.p.i’s monitoring division to see if everything is working properly, so she tripped her own alarm.

“I was really worried that there is no monitoring, and I wanted to try, what happens if I trigger an alarm,” Klug told CTV News.

She says there was no response from a.p.i or a visit from the police.

“Quite stressed because I rely on the alarm that everything is safe for all of us,” said Klug.

Klug might not be alone.

A number of people in and around Winnipeg have posted online that they can’t reach anyone at a.p,i about issues they’re experiencing since the switchover. One woman posted she set off her alarm three times and did not get a response, and another woman told CTV News her system is not working at all.

Homeowner Leo Boiteau has his own issue.

“We were getting some strange alerts,” said Boiteau

Boiteau says in the last few weeks he’s received 77 text alerts, some warning him his sensors are offline, but he can’t get any answers to find out if that’s true.

“I don’t really know even if our house is properly secure or not because we’ve had all these alerts and nobody’s contacted us,” said Boiteau.

In an email, Josh Garr from a.p.i said the company has no issues in its emergency monitoring services.

“We can’t comment on specific customers who may have issues at their home or office without knowing more details…could their phone or internet be down for example. We are experiencing a high volume to our customer service lines, which is different than our monitoring services, and our client service reps are responding to all customer service-related questions as fast as they can,” Garr said.

Garr also said out of hundreds of thousands of customers there are less than .01 per cent of issues.

“What we know is monitoring a system and a system communicating with us is different then issues at the home or business itself. For example - the systems automatically send us daily “pings” or test signals to confirm that communication between the site and us is active. If we don’t receive that signal a service ticket is created and we will contact the clients,” said Garr.