Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have large scope in structural health monitoring (SHM) applications such as monitoring strength of buildings, bridges, tunnels etc. But WSN based SHM need to face many challenges to get the same performance as its counterpart, the wired network. Placement of sensor nodes has an important role in WSN based SHM, as it needs to find a high quality position, so that it satisfies monitoring requirements and WSN challenges like energy efficiency, connectivity, fault tolerance and reliability. Monitoring quality could be obtained by sensor placement using effective independence method (SPEM) by maximizing fisher information matrix (placement quality indicator) which is used for sensor placement in Civil engineering structures, but it does not guarantee any WSN requirements. This paper therefore focuses on an energy efficient sensor placement method by improving SPEM, so that it improves the life time of sensor nodes or it minimizes the maximum energy used by the sensor for transmitting data to the base station and also ensures monitoring quality. The performance of the proposed placement method has been tested by MATLAB simulations and the result is compared with the sensor placement using effective independence method. This method obtains almost the same placement quality as that provided by using effective independence method, but with improvement in system life time.