Best Water Guns for 2025
The nature of the water itself made it a little difficult to test certain aspects of the water gun, but I felt good about the whole process.
First, we need to know how much water these things can hold. I do it by weight. Since 1 ml of water weighs 1 gram, the capacity is easily measured using a scale. After subtracting the weight of the empty blaster, you can see exactly how the capacity changes in the chart below. The Nerf Super Soaker Hydra has the largest overall capacity, followed by its Super Soaker sibling. The smallest capacity is definitely the Temi injector, as it can only store one burst of water at a time.
Once the capacity is locked, I go through the shooting process with each gun as quickly as possible to find the shortest possible time to empty the capacity. I got help from someone with a timer and sometimes had to do multiple runs. Sitting there shooting water guns non-stop for hours was more of a workout than I thought it would be.
You can see here that generally if a water gun takes a long time (more than 30 seconds) to empty, its overall soak factor (capacity divided by emptying time) will be quite low. While the fastest dump time doesn’t always mean the highest soak factor, that’s exactly how Temi works. The disposable capacity is just over 500ml and it empties in just 1.8 seconds, giving it a huge soaking factor of almost 300.
The Super Soaker siblings come in second and third with similar idle times, but the Hydra’s larger capacity gives it a better soaking factor. The older Nerf XP50-AP and Team Magnus guns have medium capacities and low soak factors, but are better at keeping you in the fight longer than similar guns.
The only other measurement test we performed was distance. The design is fairly simple, but a bit abstract.
Keeping the sprayer at the same starting point, height, and angle, I fired off a few blasts, usually five, until I was convinced that I couldn’t get the water onto an outdoor concrete surface that would be discolored by the water. I then measured from the start of the water mark to the farthest edge – ignoring any stray single drops.
