Welcome to Kapiti Crematorium. I’m Andrew.
I’m going to take you behind the curtain, into the crematorium and also into the inside of the crematorium.
Let’s go and have a look. Come behind the curtain.
This is our crematorium and Matthew’s power pack too.
I’m just going to explain how this one works. This is pretty good and pretty recent technology and it’s what’s called a hot hearth cremator. There are two sorts, cold hearth, which is just like a one level and a hot hearth where all the emissions are reburnt.
So this is a very clean green running cremator. So you see here on the screen, there’s a top chamber, a bottom chamber and a back chamber. So the flame comes into the back and heats the bottom first.
This is the one that controls the emissions. And when it’s up to temperature, we push the cremate button and it transfers the heat through the floor. So it’s not like on TV, we see all these flames shooting down, literally transfers the heat and then the casket will self-ignite.
There is some flame above. So if we do need to control that more or not, there is a single flame above, not as you say, like television, where there’s lots of flames in the cremator. And then the emissions are drawn through and down and under.
So I’ll show you the floor in a minute, but the floor is basically a floating floor so that the emissions can come underneath. Come and have a look at the floor. So it looks like it’s just solid, but it’s not.
And you’ll see in these pictures and video that in the middle is some brickwork, which acts as a table leg, if you like. It’s like a giant table. And then around the edge of the cremator, there’s a lip.
So what they do is they build two little wooden tables on either side of the brickwork, pour this concrete pad that you can see, now floor we call it, even though it’s floating, more like a table. And then of course, the first cremation
burns away that wood underneath. So you’re left with this concrete sitting on the brickwork and in the grooves.
Now, why is that important? Because you’ll see at the back, as the cremation starts, the emissions get pulled into the back and run down onto that first side under the floor. And as they come down and under, particularly through the back, that’s where the main flame is, those emissions are re-burnt. And as they come through the floor, the heat keeps burning those emissions.
They run through, you’ll see on this side, on the left hand side, there are some extra bricks. Now they are, they’re called baffles, but what they’re designed to do is just pull the stream through and tease it around so that it will open up any smoke that’s still left at that point. And again, it gets reheated as it goes through to the very back.
You see on the back on the left, that’s the bottom of where the stack is that goes up to the top. Now, if there’s any remnants of any sort of smoke at that point, we have an air pollution system on that stack to make sure if there’s a tiny bit of smoke, that the computer will actually go back and control some of that. And I’ll show you how that’s done.
Around here is the stack. So it’s run through the bottom of the cremator and up through the stack. And if there’s a tiny remnant of smoke, so this is the camera here on the left, and that runs through a hole in the stack, which then goes through to the other side where there is a sensor.
And that sensor, if it sees any smoke, there’s no glass in between, it’s just a hole, it will then tell the computer to change the air. Now, if it’s a little bit dark, it’ll control more gas. If it’s a little bit light, it’ll control more air.
So let’s show you the casket loading into the cremator. This is a very simple casket. And on every casket, we have a nameplate with the name.
And we take that nameplate off and take it over to the cremator, just as it’s about to be loaded. And it’s placed in this box. That’s where the ashes are taken out and put into after the cremation and process.
So that label stays with them the whole way. So let’s load a casket and start the cremation. This is our loading device, custom made for us.
So if you want to know more on this, go to our website www.kapiticoastfuneralhome.co.nz/ blogs.
