One of the key challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is to save energy at motes. One method to save battery is radio duty cycling (DC), which keeps the radio turned off in most of the time and turns the radio on for a short time to verify if any there are any messages. DC is frequently used in monitoring applications where only one message is transmitted after the mote reads its sensor. Usually the mote reads its sensor only once every few minutes, so few unicast messages are transmitted in the network per time unit. This work analyzes the use of the DC method in code dissemination. In this context, multiple broadcast messages are transmitted in a short time. We examined two specific dissemination algorithms, one of them proposed for a virtual machine environment, in which the disseminated code is a small script, and a second one originally proposed for disseminating the code of an entire application, typically much larger than a script. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of DC on latency and how much energy was saved when compared to leaving the radio on all the time, which is how both algorithms work in their original form.