Given: The fans can be turned off or on in the basement
Reasonable Assumption:The fans can be turned off or on in the apartments.
In basement, push button “A” once.
Disconnect wires (power) to Button “B”.
Climb stairs- Fan that’s on is attached to Button “A”.
Try turning on other two fans.
The one that does not turn on (no Power) is attached to button “B”.
The one that turns on is attached to button “C”
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Sweat evaporating is cooling. Just not the most pleasing kind.
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I suspect that a sufficiently lazy electrician could determine the answer with decent accuracy without climbing the stairs even once.
Look at the building plans. (Does it straight-out say which button is which? Then you’re done.) If there are no plans, is there an obvious, standardized way to draw the wiring?
If the rooms are increasingly further away from the wiring box, the wires should be of different lengths, say with the room-1 wires being the shortest and room-3 being longest. Wires with different lengths would have different resonance frequency, have slightly higher resistance, etc. These attributes could be tested for with the right tools.
(I’m not an electrician, but if I were, then I suspect that after my first time trudging up and down stairs for an hour, I would acquire the right tools.)
If there’s an obvious pattern in the results (“A=3, B=2, C=1”), it would be a pretty good hint.
(This would still not be 100% accurate, of course, especially given that the guy who installed the fans in the first place couldn’t be bothered to document his work. Maybe he wired the fans oddly. Maybe he didn’t even cut wires, just bunching the extra length up inside the wall…
But from the description given, our given protagonist is lazy and arrogant, so he would be fine just labeling the fans according to an educated guess. )
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Which raises the question: just how tall is this bloody building?
The record for the Empire State Building stair-climb race is nine minutes and thirty-three seconds…
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Pretty tall, but doable.
By an athlete, though. A quick Google shows the slowest time for the Q1 stair climb in 2015 to be just over an hour (78 floors). IMO, a tool-belt laden lazy tradie could cover between 60-90 floors, depending how many pies and ice-coffees he’s had at smoko.
If he’s a smoker, I’d say about 50 floors, allowing time for frequent breaks.
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Yeah, but when’s the last time you’ve seen a 50+storey building with no elevator?
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47!
And if you don’t pay the service charges…
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47 stories is the tallest residential building in the EU? Wow.
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*muttered grumbles about Americans and spelling*
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And there we have it. 
The Tempo Tower in Benidorm. 47 stories which would take a lazy electrician about an hour to climb. From the lack of proper elevators, we can assume it was built carelessly, so the wiring’s going to be dodgy. All we need to do now is find out who lives on the top floor and we can solve this bloody puzzle once and for all.
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