Reliability is crucial in many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. Most of existing approaches are redundancy-based, such as employing multi-path or retransmission schemes. However, those designs often waste energy, and thus shorten the network lifetime. To address this issue, this paper proposes an energy aware method which employs network coding scheme based on multi-path routings. By encoding a group of data into independent new packets and transmitting them along multiple paths, this paper offsets the effect of link failure with a little extra overhead. The other strength of this design is that it only needs small-scale linear operations. An approximate method to effectively estimate the number of paths needed is also employed. Comprehensive simulations and results verify the validation of the theoretical results in the paper.