How we test

Who writes these guides

Pellet App is built by shooters. The people writing these guides shoot air rifle themselves and live the sport — the guides come out of that, not out of a content brief. They are published under Pellet as an organisation rather than a personal byline; the site's operator is named in our Terms and Privacy pages.

If something here is wrong, we would rather know than not: hello@pellettrack.com.

What we don't do

When we name a pellet, it is because it comes up repeatedly in owner reports and reviews — never because someone paid for it to appear.

The method we publish

Most of what we write comes back to one repeatable protocol: change only the pellet, and hold everything else as constant as you can.

• Pick 3–5 candidates. Include at least one premium domed pellet, in two head sizes where you can get them.
• Shoot off a rest. Bipod or bags. You are testing the pellet, not your hold.
• Fix the distance. 25 or 50 yards for hunting and field — whatever you actually shoot at — and keep it identical for every pellet.
• Test in one session, in similar wind. Wind is the biggest hidden variable; a gust can make a good pellet look bad.
• Shoot 5-shot groups, at least two per pellet. One group can lie. Two or three reveal the pattern.
• Stay in the consistent part of the fill on a PCP — not the first or last few shots.
• Measure and record every group. This is the step most shooters skip, and the one that turns a hunch into an answer.

How we measure

Group size is quoted centre-to-centre, because it cancels out calibre and stays comparable across rifles and distances. Three shots can fall into almost any shape by chance, so five is our workable minimum and ten is meaningfully better.

Where conditions matter, they are recorded rather than remembered — temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, humidity, altitude and density altitude, along with wind angle relative to the shot. Pellets are tracked by lot number, because performance moves between production runs.

Where model-specific recommendations come from

This is the part worth being blunt about. Our rifle-specific pages are starting points, not verdicts. The pellets listed for the Air Arms S510, Weihrauch HW100 and Daystate Red Wolf are the ones that come up repeatedly in UK airgun forum threads, owner reports and published reviews. They are not the output of controlled tests run by us on those rifles.

We say so on the pages themselves, and we mean it: nobody has run a controlled test on your barrel. Two rifles off the same production line can prefer different pellets, which is the entire reason the protocol above exists. Use our lists to decide what to buy and test — not to skip the testing.

Law and safety

Guides covering power limits and firearms law are general orientation, not legal advice. Legislation changes and its interpretation varies case by case. We link the primary sources — the legislation itself and the responsible authorities — and we would much rather you checked with them than relied on us.

Corrections

Every guide carries a visible publication date. If you find something wrong, email hello@pellettrack.com and we will correct it.