In ad hoc networks, energy preservation on communication is crucial because most of nodes are battery-powered. On the other hand, communication delay is an important factor of real-time communications. Since energy-aware routes commonly have long route lengths, which commonly result long communication delays, a trade-off has to be made on route setup between energy preservation and communication delay. Moreover, long route length also incurs high packet drop rate, which causes low reliability and high retransmission cost. We propose on-demand energy-aware route search algorithms with limited route length (ODEAR-LRL). ODEAR-LRL exploits timer-based RREQ flooding method. Even though timer based RREQ flooding does not guarantee the optimality, our evaluation shows that our on-demand algorithms fairly approximate to the optimal cost.