The surface i am working on is thin cardboard (cereal box stuff)
Did you know if you are cooking with gas you are supposed to run the fan and crack a window. Cooking puts CO in to the room. With winter here we seal things up and it can build up. I have seen where people have had a stew on the burner and grandma cooked all day eventually building up the CO and when the furnace kicked on, moving the air, it set off the alarm. The fact it is only on one floor suggests this. If it was a breached heat exchanger in the furnace it should be evenly distributed throughout the house. I would suggest getting one of those plug in CO detectors with a digital read out and that gives you an idea of the level of CO. Some are rather good. And you could move it around to help narrow down the source or determine if it may be coming from the cooking. Good Luck and be safe.
A lightning is a large scale example of an electrical arc.This lightning occurs when the potential difference between the cloud and the earth exceeds what is called breakdown potential.This arc completes(closes) the electrical circuit which extends from the cloud to the ground due to which enormous current flows through it.This current will try to reach the earth through a path of least resistance.The lightning arrester , being an metallic object offers the least resistance to the currnet than buildings and trees whose resistance is more than that of the lightning arrester.So a lightning rod offers an easy path to the current produced by the lightning to reach the earth without damaging any other object nearby.
