Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are commonly used for continuously monitoring applications. Data gathering and in-network processing are techniques to efficiently gather the information from sensor nodes. Usually, these techniques have been analyzed taking into account a global knowledge of the system in order to select the best path to gather the information or to establish a routing function. In this paper we propose a novel distributed data gathering algorithm for wireless networks and evaluate the effect of having a different number of cluster heads transmitting to the base station. We focus the attention on uniformly distributed nodes in a given area to evaluate the effects on the energy consumption. Our proposal distributes uniformly the energy consumption between the complete set of sensors in the system resulting in a similar longevity for all sensors in the system.