[Laforet]

>It's fine for the first cup or two, but after that it starts to burn. Wash your hands with it and you'll find you skin is dry and cracking.

I have handled and, against my better judgement, quaffed many types of deionised water: triple glass distilled, reverse osmosis, ion exchange, etc. They taste more or less the same to store-bought distilled water and I have not yet had any of the ailments in your complaint. There is also a certain coworker who developed a pechant for the MilliQ water machine and regularly filled her drink bottle with ultrapure (>18.2 megaohms) water there. Suffice to say she is still doing it.

>But really, get over it, 99% of the US has safe tap water

This is not necesarily true given the state of water infrastructure in the US. The water leaving a treatment plant is not the same as water coming out of a tap.

[coryrc]

Water departments are supposed to do surveys at residential taps to evaluate the effect of alkalinity on lead in the water as it is actually drank. Even the small town I came from does. Seattle, for example, made some changes based on these surveys: http://www.seattle.gov/util/MyServices/Water/Water_Quality/W...

[makomk]

Water departments have been cheating on those surveys to get the right results. That's one of the causes of this scandal.

[thescriptkiddie]

For what it's worth, I could be mistaken. The storebought deionized water I get could be contaminated with carbonic acid, which would explain the burning.

[Laforet]

Distilled water tends to exhibit an acidic because there are nk dissolved salts to buffer against atomspheric carbon dioxide which forms carbonic acid once dissolved. However I would be very surprised if store bought water contains enough CO2 to irritate human skin, unless you meant carbolic acid instead of carbonic acid.