Wireless sensor networks which employ a routing protocol from the Flooding family are often assumed to waste a great amount of energy generating duplicate packets . Simulations were conducted showing that the assumption is not true for one member of the flooding family, the gossip-based sleep protocol (GSP). Simulation results show that the performance of GSP in 100-node square grid networks eliminates the risk of packet explosion while retaining the benefits of a flooding protocol. The paper also presents a novel energy consumption analysis, revealing that the majority of energy is used for idle listen, when there are no packet transmissions.