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My garage stays around 50°F even though the outside temperature has been around 10°F every night and barely above freezing during the day for the past couple of weeks. And this is solely from sunshine! No gas or electric heater in the garage (though it is well insulated). It is very nice not to have my hands frozen to the steering wheel in winter or need to scrape ice off the windshield!
The garage has a big south-facing window which gets full sun (filtered through some bare tree branches). This lets the heat of the sun warm the garage during the winter. In summer, this same window is shaded -- because the sun is higher in the sky -- by 'eyebrow' shades carefully placed above the south windows to allow fulll sun in winter and block full sun in summer.
The rest of our house is likewise heated by solar radiation, though supplemented with a gas furnace, which I'm trying to replace with a heat pump.
All this, thanks to James Kachadorian, Passive Solar House: The Complete Guide to Heating and Cooling Your Home, which I studied when designing this house. Available on Amazon (2006 edition).
Mid-day in January the angle of the sun is 36°, so the shadow does not block the window.
Mid-day in July the angle of the sun (in Taos) is 71°, so the shadow blocks all of the window.
Using these two angles, it is easy to design an 'eyebrow' shade over the window.
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