Energy consumption and packet loss are common concerns in wireless sensor networks. However, designing protocols to minimize both metrics becomes very challenging because these are competing goals. In this paper, a data dissemination approach is proposed that uses probabilistic network coding to achieve a balance between energy consumption and packet loss. A subset of the network nodes, forming a directed acyclic graph, is selected to perform the encoding process under a certain probability. These nodes are the ones responsible for data delivery towards the gateways. The encoding probability is based on the kind of packet received: the more innovative the packet is, the higher the probability of going through the encoding process. The results show that random linear network coding, under such conditions, is able to adequately minimize energy consumption and packet drops, while being a very practical solution.