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Just the other day I bought a pressure washer from a guy that said he bought it new last year and used it once or something. When I was at his house it started up pretty much instantly and ran great so I bought it. Of course, after I cleaned off a couple transmissions it started running rough and even backfiring or popping out the exhaust and in general not having much power and being very difficult to restart.

In general, these issues could be caused by poor fuel quality, timing, poor spark, excessive carbon buildup, etc. but obviously none of those aside from one are likely to change in the span of a few minutes or even be a reasonable likelihood on a year old engine. Drained out the year old fuel put in fresh 93 and it works great now.

In terms of using old fuel in general for my 55, it has a 56, 9 and 1/2 compression in it. So I have to use fresh high octane fuel to not worry about pinging and I can reuse the fuel that was in it that's a few months old and was high octane to begin with and something else. If the fuel is so old that you wouldn't run it in a Packard straight 8 with something like 7.0 or 7.5 compression, then you certainly shouldn't run it in any other engine with 7.0 or 7.5 compression (i.e. basically any small equipment engine).

As Guscha said it works VERY well to clean things. Just be sure to wear gloves and use it in a very well ventilated and spark free environment...

If you do a lot of driving in your daily driver, the other thing you can do is mix like 1 gallon of old fuel into the tank whenever you get gas and slowly dispose of it that way.

Octane rating is not the issue with old fuel. It physically attacks fuel system parts and can plug jets, foul spark plugs, and cause valves to stick. It becomes very hard to ignite and burns more like kerosene with sugar or paint in it, if and when it does ignite. If in doubt, throw it out. It is not valuable, and it can and almost certainly will cause a lot of trouble. My dad bought a new mower at a fall sale, and stored it over the winter along with about half a gallon of gas. The following March, he rolled it out and filled the tank with some of the stored gas. It ran about 3 minutes, then bogged down and quit and would not restart. I found the intake valve stuck wide open and a gooey deposit in the new fuel tank. It took several hours to clean the tank and carburetor and free the valve. But he did save that 75 cents worth of gas....